[rana, ericq]

We spent time trying to relieve the Yend green PDH of it troubles. 

We realized that the mixer in the PDH setup (mini circuits ZAD-8+), wants 7dBm of LO to properly function. However, we use one function generators output, through a splitter, to give signals to the laser PZT and the mixer LO. 

We don't want 7dBm of power hitting the laser PZT, though. The summing node that adds the servo output to the sideband signal was supposedly designed to do some of this attenuation. Rana measured that 10Vpp out of the function generator resulted in 20mVpp on the fast input to the NPRO, after the summing node. Hence, the 0.09V setting was only resulting in something like 0.2mV hitting the PZT. The PZT has something like 30 rad/V PM response, meaning we only had ~0.006 rad of modulation. 

Now, the function generator is set to 2 Vpp, meaning 4 mVpp hitting the PZT, meaning ~0.12 radians of modulation. The mixer is now getting +7dBm on its LO, and the PDH traces look much cleaner. However, the PDH error signal is now something like 100mVpp, which is much bigger than the PDH board is designed for, so there is now a 10dB attenuator between the reflection PD DC block and the RF input to the mixer. 

Here are screenshots of the Inmon channel (which has a gain of ~20) showing a sweep through some PDH signal, and the error signal while in green lock. Huge 60Hz harmonics are still observed. 

Regarding these 60Hz issues, we need to make sure that we remove all situations where long BNCs are chained together with barrel connectors, or Ts are touching other ones. We also should glue or affix the pomona summing box to the shelf, so that its not just laying on the floor.

The concrete next step is to go fiddle with things, and see if we can get the 60Hz noise to go away, then measure the PDH loop and noises again. Hopefully, this should make the ALS much more reliable. 

I remeasured all of the noise spectra again today, making sure the input attenuation was as low as it could safely be. I also got a snap of the y green PDH signal; it's fairly larger than I saw the other day, which is good. I used this to calibrate the error signal voltage spectra. 

Here are the noise traces for each arm. During these measurements GTRX was about .6, GTRY about 1.0 The Yarm noise doesn't look so good: the error signal is just barely above the mixer+lowpass output noise, and the RMS is plauged by 60Hz lines. (Is this related to what we see in IR TRY sometimes?)

Here are the arms error signals compared directly:

 I calibrated the control signal from Volts to Hz using the rough PZT calibration of 5MHz/V for the Yend NPRO.  

For the error signal, Q said that the Yarm PDH peak-to-peak height was about a factor of 100 smaller than the Xarm, so I used a calibration of 1.9e7 Hz / V.

Then, from Q's Mist simulation including the high Xarm loss, and the plot that he posted in the control room, the CARM linewidth looks like it is about 2pm.  This is the number that I have included on today's plot.  Note though that yesterday I was using a linewidth of about 30pm, which I got from an Optical simulation about a year ago.  I do not know why these numbers come out an order of magnitude different!      The CARM linewidth is actually about 20 pm.  Both Q and I failed at reading log-x plots yesterday.  I have corrected this, and replotted.

Anyhow, here's the Yarm noise spectra calibrated plot:

I have emailed Kiwamu, but haven't heard back from him yet on what the original design considerations were, if he remembered us ever using a boost, etc.  What this looks like to me is that we need to do some serious work to get the noise down.  Maybe fixing the gain peaking and triggering the boost will get us most of the way there?

A MIST simulation tells me that the green pdh horn-to-horn displacement is about 1.2nm, or ~18kHz. I used this, along with the scope trace attached to the previous post, to calibrate the mixer output at 193419 Hz per V. (EDIT: I was a little too hasty here. What I'm really after is the slope of the zero crossing, which turns out to be almost exactly twice my earlier naïve estimate. See later post for correct spectra)

For the control signal, I assumed a flat Innolight PZT PM response of 1MHz/V. ( Under 10kHz, it is indeed flat, and this is the region where the control signal is above the servo output noise in yesterday's measurements)

Here are all of the same spectra from last night, with the above calibrations. 

Going off Jenne's earlier plot, it looks like the in-loop error signal RMS is ten times bigger than the CARM linewidth. 

 [ericq, Gabriele] 

Summary: After today's meeting, Gabriele and I looked into the arm loss situation, to see if we should really believe the losses that had been suggested by my previous measurements. We made some observations that we're not sure how to explain, and we're thinking about other ways to try and estimate the losses to corroborate previous findings. 

We first looked to see if the ASS had some effective offset, leaving the alignment not quite right. Once ASS'd, we twiddled each arm cavity mirror in pitch and yaw to see if we could achieve higher transmission. We could not, so this suggested that ASS works properly. 

We then looked at potential offsets in the Xarm loop. We found that an input offset of 25 counts increased the transmission, but only very slightly. With this offset adjusted, we confirmed the qualitative observation that locking/unlocking the xarm causes a much bigger change in ASDC than doing the same with the harm.

However, we noted that the ASDC data (which is the DC value of the AS55 RFPD) was quite noisy, hovering around 50 counts. Looking at the c1lsc model, we found that we were looking at direct ADC counts, so the signal conditioning was not so great. We went to the LSC rack and stole the SR560 that had been hooked up as a REFLDC offsetter, and used it to give ASDC a gain of 100, and a LP at 100Hz, since we only care about DC values. We then undid the gain in the input FM; and this calmed the trace down a fair bit. The effects due to each arm locking/unlocking was still consistent with previous observations. 

At this point, we looked at the arm transmission and ASDC signals simultaneously. Normally, when misaligning a cavity, one would expect the reflected power to rise and the transmission to fall.

However, we saw that when misalignment the Yarm in yaw in either direction, or the Xarm in one direction, both the IR transmission and ASDC would fall. This initially made us think of clipping effects. 

So, we checked out the AS beam situation on the AP table. On a card, the beam looks round as we could tell, and the beam spot on AS55 was nice and small. (We tweaked its steering a little bit in pitch to put it at the center of the "falling-off" points) The reflection and transmission falling effect remained. 

At this point, we're not really sure what could be causing this effect. After the reflected beams recombine at the BS, the output path is common, so it's strange that this odd effect would be the same for both arms. 

Lastly, we discussed other ways that we may be able to see if the Xarm really has ~500ppm loss. Since its transmission is ~1.4%, Gabriele estimated that we may be able to see a ~300Hz difference in the arm cavity pole frequency between the two arms, based on the modification of the cavity finesse due to loss. Since we don't currently have the AOM set up to inject intensity noise, we talked about using frequency noise injection to measure the arm cavity poles, though this would be coupled with the IMC pole, but this could hopefully be accounted for.

I've made a whole bunch of measurements on the Xarm green situation.

TL;DRs:

• GTRX was around 0.55 for all of the measurements tonight. 
• Based on where I saw gain peaking in the CLG, it looked like UGF was 1-2kHz. I cranked the gain to 10kHz, ~20dB gain peaking followed, making it hard to measure. Currently sitting at 5kHz-ish. 
• Measured CLG with AG4395A, calibrated for injection point response, inferred OLG. 
• Took various PSDs, still need to calibrate into physically meaningful units. 

Reasonable amounts of time were spent bending the AG4395 to my will; i.e. figuring out the calibration things Jenne and Rana did, finding the right excitation amplitude and profile that would leave the light steadily locked, and finding the right GPIB incantation for getting spectra in PSD units instead of power units. I'm nearing completion of a newer version of AG4395 scripts that have proper units, and pseudo-log spectra (i.e. logarithmically spaced linear sweeps)

Transfer functions

Here is too many traces on one plot showing parts of the OLTF for the x green PDH. One notable omission is the PD response (note to self:check model and bandwidth). The servo oddly seems to have a notch around 100k. My calibration for the CLG injection may not have been perfect, instead of flattening out at 0dB, I had 2dB residual. I tried to correct for it after the fact, assuming that certain regions were truly flat at 0dB, but I want to revisit it to be thorough. I found some old measurements of the Innolight PZT PM response, which claims to be in rad/V, and have included that on the plot. 

In the end, the mixer and PZT response make it look like getting over 10kHz bandwidth may be tough. Even finding a good higher modulation frequency to be able to scoot the LP up would leave us with the sharp slope in the PZT phase loss, and could cause bad gain peaking. Maybe it's worth thinking about a faster way of modulating the green light?

Noise Spectra

Tomorrow morning, I'll calibrate all the noise spectra I have into real units. These include:

• In loop error signal and control signal spectra
• Mixer output spectrum when PD is dark, and when mixer input is terminated
• Servo out spectrum when PD is dark, and when servo input is terminated

However, looking at the floors, it occurs to me that I may have left the attenuation on the input too high, in an effort to protect the input the PDH box, which rails all the time when not locked to a 00 mode, sometimes even with the input terminated or open. It's kind of a pain that the agilent makes it really hard to see the data when you're in V/rtHz mode, because I should've caught this while measuring :/

I used a scope to capture a pdh signal happening, which will let me transform the mixer output into cavity motion. The control signal goes to the innolight PZT with a ~1MHz/V factor. Here are the uncalibrated plots, for now. 

It's not so impressive yet, but here's a plot that shows (a) Rana's guess for laser frequency noise, (b) The inferred in-loop version of that noise, (c) The CARM linewidth FWHM, translated to Hz.

For (b), I take the loop that Rana and I measured last night, and I assumed that it continued on forever as 1/f toward low frequency.  Then I do 1/(1+G) to get the closed loop version of the loop (which is a measurement with an artificial line tacked on the end), and multiply this with the laser freq noise, which is also totally artificial.

For (c), I do df/f = dL/L, with f = c/lambda_green, since the rest of the plot is meant to be in green frequency units.

This is my beginnings of trying to come up with a requirement for our green PDH boxes.  We weren't very clear in the MultiColor paper about the nitty-gritty details (obviously), but then Kiwamu didn't expand on those details in his thesis either.  He talks a lot more about the design considerations for the digital ALS loop, which isn't what I want today.  I will send him an email to see if he had any notes that didn't make it into his thesis.

 Here is a plot of last night's data with both the control and the error point on the same plot, in Volts.  Q is still working, so I don't have a calibration number yet to get these to Hz.

Note in the control spectrum that we have very significant 60Hz lines.  

EDIT:  I also added a new branch to the DCC Document Tree, and 2 leafs (one for each end).  Here's the ALS PDH servo branch: E1400350

IMC Calculation and Setup

I have been working in the calculation for improving the Gouy Phase separation between the WFSs. I tried different possible setup, but the three big constrains in choosing a good optical table setup are to have a Waist size that range from 1mm-2mm, the Gouy Phase  between the WFSs have to be greater than 75 degrees and there has to be a steering mirror before each WFS. I will be showing the best calculation because that calculation complies with Rana request of having both WFSs facing west and having the shortest beam path. I approximate the distances by measuring with a tape the distance where the current optics are located and by looking at the picture that I took I approximated the distance where the lenses will be placed. I'm using a la mode for calculating the gouy phase different. I attached a picture of the current optical table setup that we have. Using a la mode, I found that the current gouy phase that we have is 49.6750 degrees.

Now, for the new setup, a run a la mode and found a Gouy phase of 89.3728 degrees. I have to create a two independent beam path: one for the WFS1 and another one for WFS2. The reason for this is that a la mode place everything in one dimension so and since the WFS1 will have a divergence lens in order to increase the waist size, and since that lens should not be interacting with the waist size in the WFS2. We need two beam path for each WFS.  A la mode give us the following solution:

For the beam path of the WFS1

    label                z (m)           type             parameters        
    -----                  -----              ----             ----------        
    MC1                   0              flat mirror          none:           
    MC3                   0.1753     flat mirror          none:           
    MC2                   13.4587   curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700 (m)     
    Lens1                 29.3705   lens                  focalLength: 1.0201 (m)
    BS2                    29.9475   flat mirror          none:           
    First Mirror         30.0237   flat mirror          none:           
    Lens3                30.2000    lens                  focalLength: -0.100 (m)
    WFS1                30.4809    flat mirror         none: 

For the beam path of the WFS2

    label                   z (m)             type             parameters        
    -----                    -----                 ----             ----------        
    MC1                    0               flat mirror          none:           
    MC3                    0.1753      flat mirror          none:           
    MC2                    13.4587    curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700 (m)     
    Lens1                  29.3705    lens                   focalLength: 1.0201 (m)
    BS2                     29.9475    flat mirror          none:           
    Second Mirror    30.2650     flat mirror          none:           
    Lens2                 30.4809     lens                  focalLength: -0.075 (m)
    Third Mirror        30.5698     flat mirror          none:           
    WFS2                30.6968      flat mirror          none:  

I attached bellow how the new setup should look like in the second picture and also I include and attachment of the a la mode code.

 I used Mist to be able to see the read out that we get in the WFSs that take the Mode Cleaner Reflection and the QPD that take the transmitted from MC2. In the following, plots I'm misaligned the each mirrors: MC1, MC2 and MC3. The misalignment are in Yaw and Pitch. I'm dividing the WFSs reading by the total power reflect power, and I'm dividing the QPD for the MC2 transmission by the total transmitted power. In my Mist model, I have a laser of 1W and my EOM is modulated at 30MHz instead of 29.5MHz and the modulation depth was calculating by measuring the applied voltage using and Spectrum analyzer. I using Kiwamu measurement of modulation depth efficiency vs the applied voltage, https://dcc.ligo.org/DocDB/0010/G1000297/001/G1000297-v1.pdf,  I got a modulation depth of 0.6 mrad. I put this modulation depth and I got the following plots: The fourth and fifth attachment are for the current optical setup that we have. The sixth and seventh attachment is for the new optical setup. The eighth attachment is showing the mode cleaner cavity resonating. The last attachment contains the plots of WFS1 vs WFS2, MC2_QPD vs WFS1, MC2_QPD vs WFS3 for each mirror misaligned. The last two attachment are the MIST code for the calculation.

We have all the lenses that we need. I checked it last Friday and if everything is good we will be ready to do the new upgrade this coming Friday. For increasing the power, I check and we have different BS so we can just switch from the current setup the BS. Can you let me know if this setup look good or if I need to chance the setup? I would really love to do this upgrade before I leave.

Heading to dinner, going to come back for more green fun, but here's a quick update:

Xarm Peak-to-Peak of the PDH signal in the mixer output is about 70mV when GTRX was about 0.4. The sideband-generating function generator has an output of 2V (forgot to note rms or pp)

Yarm Peak-to-Peak of the PDH signal in the mixer output is about 640uV when GTRX was about 0.71. The sideband-generating function generator has an output of 0.091V (forgot to note rms or pp)

The Yarm signal thus correspondingly has a waaay noisier trace. I would've had scope plots to show here, but the scope freaked out about how large my USB drive capacity was and refused to talk to it >:|

This suggests to me that our modulation depth for the Yarm may be much too small, and may be part of our problems with it. 

[ Rana, Jenne]

We remeasured the Yend PDH box.

When we first started, the green couldn't hold lock to the arm - it kept flickering between modes.  Changing the gain of the PDH box (from 7.5 to 6.0) helped.

We measured a calibration, from our injection point to our measurement point.

The concept was that we'd take the mixer output, and put that into an SR560, and put the swept sine injection into the other input port of the '560, and use A-B.  So, for this calibration, we left A unplugged, and just had the RF out of the 4395 going to input B of the '560.  The 600 Ohm output of the '560 went to the error point input on the PDH box (during normal operation the mixer output is connected directly to the error point input).  The SR560 was set to gain of 1, no filtering.  I don't recall if we were using high range or low noise, but we tried both and didn't really see a difference between them.

We had the 4395 take that calibration out, and then we measured the closed loop gain up to 1 MHz. (Same measurement setup as above, but we connected the mixer out to the input of the SR560 to close the loop, and made sure we were locked on a TEM00 green mode.) Rana used an ipython notebook to infer the open loop gain from our measurement.  Our conclusion is that we don't have nearly enough gain margin in our loop.  We found the PDH box gain knob at 7.5, and we turned it down to 6.0, but the loop is still pretty borderline. We used the high impedance active probe to measure the error point monitor, since we aren't sure that that point can drive a 50 Ohm load.

We also measured the error point spectra and the control point spectra.  Unfortunately, the saved data from the analyzer (no matter what is on the screen) comes out in spectrum, not spectral density.  So, we need to check our conversion, but right now to get from Watts power to Volts, we do sqrt(50 ohm * data).  We then need to get to spectral density, and right now we're just dividing by the square root of the bandwith that is reported in the .par file. This last step is the one we want to especially check, by perhaps putting some known amount of noise (from an SR785?) into the 4395, and checking that our calibration math returns the expected noise spectrum.

What still needs to be done is to calibrate this into Hz/rtHz.  To do this, we were thinking that we should look at the error point on a 'scope while the cavity is flashing.

Anyhow, here is the uncalibrated error point spectrum.  Purple is a measurement up to 30kHz, with 30Hz bandwidth.  Blue is a measurement up to 300kHz with 300Hz bandwidth.  The gain peaking schmutz above 10kHz sucks, and we'd like to get rid of it.  We also see the same peak at ~150kHz that Q saw earlier today.  We were using the high impedance probe here too.

 We have the data for the control point (all the data files are in /users/jenne/ALS/PDHloops/Yend_18Aug2014), but we haven't plotted it yet.

Things that need doing:

* (JCD) Think about this box's purpose in life.  What kind of gain do we need?  Do we need more / less than we're currently getting? NPRO freq noise is 1/f and is 10kHz/rtHz at 1Hz (this is from a plot of an iLIGO NPRO from Rana's thesis, but it's probably similar). Talk to Kiwamu; the noise budget in the paper seems to indicate that we had some kind of boost on or something.  Also, if we need much more gain than we already have, we'll definitely need a different box, maybe the PDH2 box that they have over in WBridge.

* (EQ, priority 1) Measure and calibrate error point noise down to lower freq for both arms.  What could we win by putting in a boost? If the residual noise is high, maybe the laser isn't good at following arm, so beatnote isn't good length info for the arm, and we can't succeed.

* (EQ, priority 2) Measure TF of PDH box, and a separate measurement of the Pomona box that is between the mixer and the error point - is that eating a bunch of phase?  It's already an LC circuit which is good, but do we really want a 120kHz lowpass when our modulation frequency is roughly 200kHz?  Ask ChrisW - he worked on one of these with Dmass.

* (EQ, priority 2ish) Measure TF of Xend PDH loop (unless you already have one, up to ~1MHz).

* (JCD) Make DCC tree leaf for PDH box #17.  Take photos of box.

So far today, I've been working with the Y-end green PDH locking. Using a SR560 to roll off the AG4395A output to take a loop measurement at the servo output, I measured the following OLG, and inferred the CLG from it. The SR560 really helped it getting good coherence without introducing a big offset that changes the optical gain, thus distorting the loop shape, etc. etc. 

You would think this loop looks pretty good, 10k UGF, and 45 degrees of phase margin, gain peaking is sane, and pretty smooth slope. But, the thing still was flipping out of lock while I measured this. 

I suspect shenanigans at >100k. This is motivated by the fact that I've seen some big noise in the error signal around 150k. I don't have a good noise plot right now, because I'm trying to get a scheme going where I stitch together a bunch of 1 decade spectra from the 4395, but the noise floor isn't consistent across each patch (even though the attenuation stays the same, and I confirmed I'm in "noise" mode). I'm working on a loop measurement up there, too, but I haven't been able to get the right filter/amplitude settings yet. 

So, even though this plot is not totally correct (read: wrong and bad), I include it just for the sake of showing the big honking spike of noise at ~150K.  

Riju did the measurement of the MCREFL PD.
I found data files in her directory on the control machine.

I was not sure how much was the transimpedance of the DC out.
I assumed the default number from the circuit diagram which was 66.7Ohm.
This may cause the error in absolute caribration of the transimpedance but the shape does not change.

The RF preamp is gain-peeking at 250MHz.

Here is further characterization of the PD response.
As you can see in the second attachment, the 3dB cut off of the resonance is about 2.3MHz.

The game plan file in dropbox was also modified.

 A few things that I have neglected to ELOG yet:

• scripts/offsets/LSCoffsets is a new script that uses ezcaservo to set FM offsets of our LSC PDs. It still warns about large changes, and lets you revert. It reads the FM gain to pick the right gain for the ezcaservo call. 

• MC refl DC was all over the place today, and has recently been "fuzzier" on the wall StripTool than I like. I touched the MC2 pointing a little bit, and the WFS seemed to find a sweet spot where the refl got steady back at around and under 0.5. I then ran "offload WFS" to try and stay there. 

• Incidentally, the PMC transmission drifted up to 0.81 at some point today. This is weird, since not too long ago, we were not able to reach this level even with careful alignment. This coincided with the MC power being back up to ~17k, and arms locking at around 0.95. 

• Last week I quickly tried cranking up the x-end green modulation frequency to ~1.3MHz (corresponding to a notch in the PZT AM response), and using a 550k lowpass on the mixer output, instead of a 70k, to try to buy more phase and increase the UGF. It didn't work. I didn't have a way to tune the mixer phase angle, and the mixer output was super noisy, but there were instants where I could convince myself that a mode was briefly locked to the arm... I'm going to do the Right Thing and characterize the loop properly, to figure out how to get at least 10kHz of control bandwidth out of these things. 

As Jenne mentioned, I did this. 

Specifically, I first tweaked the mirror pointing the IR into the SGH in pitch and yaw to maximize the green power, and then adjusted the little set screws on the side of the SHG to maximize further. Power after the harmonic separator was of order 150uW. On the Y Green BBPD, I got ~48uW, instead of the 40uW Rana, Jenne, and myself saw the other night. 

HOWEVER,

now that I look through old ELOGs, I find some posts by Kiwamu saying the power should be around 650uW, and that he was able to get 640uW out. So: I should do this again, systematically, more carefully, etc., etc. (Linked ELOG also states that optimum SHG temperature is alignment dependent...)

 Earlier today Q and I somewhat resurrected my old PER measurement setup so I could run the temperature characterization experiment.

Unfortunately, when I tried to use the fiber illuminator, no light came from the other end, causing me to fail my primary goal for the summer of "don't break anything." The fiber has been re-spooled and labeled appropriately. Also sorry.

In addition to this, Q and I scavenged parts from the telescopes on the PSL and Y End tables, which were either not functional, or needed to have their mode matching adjusted, since we're using the non-PM fibers for FOL, which have a different numerical aperture, and thus slightly different output modes.

Specifically, this is involved removing the rotational mounts, and appropriate beam dumping.

My "calorimeter" still remains intact, in case anyone wants to make this measurement in the future, as this is my last day in the lab.

It's also effective at keeping drinks cold, if you'd rather use it for that.

One question answered, but another raised. The offset came from LSC-TRY switching to the ETMY-QPD signal from ETMY-TRY (Hi gain pd). 

BUT WHY

Again unknown, but about 6 hours ago (so ~8am) the offset disappeared. 

Here's a 1-day trend:

The game plan graffle file is now in the 40m dropbox, so anyone can edit it.  Please just make sure to keep the date in the top right corner accurate.

 Not sure why, but Rana and I didn't see the super high Xarm noise with ALS that we reported last night (elog 10382).  

The in-loop ALS noise seems fine.  The out of loop measurement while the ALS is locked is a little tricky, since ALS hold the arms within the POX/POY linear ranges.  

Here is the in-loop noise:

I have added a few things to the ASS model, and the ASC sub-block, so that we can send POP QPD information down to the ETMs for CARM angular control after we've reduced the CARM offset and gotten some carrier buildup.  I did not remove our ability to actuate on PRM, so that we can still play with it in PRMIsb cases.

The input matrix has been expanded so that it can send signals to new CARM_YAW and CARM_PIT filter banks.  The corresponding filter banks have been created.  The output matrix was also expanded to take in the 2 new servo outputs, and so it can send signals to both ETMs, pitch and yaw.  I did not include any triggering logic for this new CARM situation, since I assume we'll just turn it on and off with our scripts.  (We haven't really been using the triggering capability of the PRM ASC either lately, although it's all still there).  I added the inputs and outputs of the CARM servos to the list of acquired channels.

The ASC sub-block:

I also modified the top level of the ASS model.  This was just a simple addition of summing nodes for the ETMs, similar to what was already in place for the PRM, so that we can send both the ASS dither alignment signals and the ASC servo control signals to the optics.

The ASS top level:

I also quickly modified the ASC screen to expose all of the new options:

The ASS model was compiled, and restarted.  As usual, this temporarily removes the biases on the input pointing tip tilts, but the pointing seems to have come back without any trouble.

 We used to do violin mode and test mass body mode notches in the SUS-LSC filter modules. Now we want them balanced in the LSC and triggered by the LSC, so they're in the filter modules which go from the the LSC output matrix to the SUS.

Today, we were getting ETM violin mode ringups while doing ALS hunt and so we moved the bandstops into the LSC. I also changed the bandstop from a wide one which missed the ETMX mode to a double bandstop which gets both the ETMX and the ETMY mode. See attached image of the Bode mag.

 We've been having trouble tuning the ALS DIFF matrix. Trying to see if the MC2 EXC can be cancelled in ALS DARM by adjusting the relative gains in ALSX and ALSY Phase Tracker outputs.

There's a bunch of intermittent behavior. Between different ALS locks, we get more or less cancellation. We were checking this by driving MC2 at ~100-400 Hz and checking the ALS response (with the ALS loops closed). We noticed that the X and Y readbacks were different by ~5-10 degrees and that we could not cancel this MC2 signal in DARM by more than a factor of 4-5 or so. In the middle of this, we had one lock loss and it came back up with 100x cancellation?

Attached is a PDF showing a swept sine measurement of the ALSX, ALSY, and DARM signals. You can see that there is some phase shift between the two repsonses leading to imperfect cancellation. Any ideas? Whitening filters? HOM resonance? Alignment?

I don't know why, but TRY has somehow gotten a 0.3 count offset in the last hour. 

Rana and I are witnesses for each other that neither of us has gone into the IFO room in the last several hours (and we're the only ones here).  For some reason though, the TRY PD now has a 0.3 count offset.  We have been doing some ALS locks, but we have not run the offset script in the last several hours.  Closing the green shutter doesn't change things, and we still see the offset when the MC loses lock, so it's not to do with the end or the PSL laser.  We haven't been in there, so there hasn't been a change in the room lights. 

The instigator of this was that we were seeing ring-ups of ETMs during our ALS locks this evening.  We measured the ETMY violin resonance to be 624.10 Hz, and Rana found an elog saying that the ETMX was around 631 Hz, so we made a 2 notch filter and added it to FM4 of the LSC-SUS filter banks for both ETMs. 

For the ETMY resonance, we measured the frequency in the DARM spectrum, and when we looked at the FINE_PHASE_OUT channels, the resonance was only in the Yarm sensor.  So, we conclude that it is coming from ETMY.

Also in the realm of filter modules, the FM3 boost for CARM, DARM, XARM and YARM was changed from zero crossing to ramp with a 1sec ramp time.

Mech Resonance Wiki

I've updated the wiki by trawling the elog for violin entries. Please keep it up to date so that we can make violin notches.

Last night, and again just now, I used the ./MC2_spot_[direction] scripts to center the MC2 spot on the trans QPD.  The MCWFS handled overall alignment to correct for the fact that the ratios in the script aren't perfect.  When I was finished, I ran the MC WFS relief script from the WFS screen.  Last night, and again today, things had drifted until the yaw spot was more than 0.5 counts off.

 When the IMC locks, we want the FAST OUT of the TTFSS box to be close to zero volts. We also want the control signal from the MC Servo board to be close to 0 V. How to set this up?

With the IMC locked, we just servo the FSS input offset to minimize the MC board output :

ezcaservo -r C1:IOO-MC_FAST_MON -g 0.1 -t 10 C1:PSL-FSS_INOFFSET

I would have used "CDSUTILS", but that seems to have some sort of ridiculous bug where we can't have prefixes on channel names, even on the command line. 

 Based on the game plan, I have created a slew of updated pretty plots about our signals and loops. 

First: With measured arm losses, when do we start to see REFL DC dip? At what arm buildup powers? 

I updated my MIST model with the arm losses I've measured (Y:130ppm, X:530ppm), and some measured transmissions from the wiki, vs. the design parameters, as I used to have. Here is the DC sweep plot which is now hanging up in the control room. 

In this plot, I also calculated what MIST thinks the full arm power buildup will be as compared to our single arm locking, and I get something of order 200, rather than the 600 we've tossed around in discussions. Nothing else is very different in this plot from the old version; though the REFLDC dip is a little bit wider. 

Now, here are some radiation-pressure inclusive sensing transfer functions, for the anti-spring case (which in Rob's day was easier to lock for unknown reasons):

Next: Include new AO path TFs into CM model Look at possibilities for engaging AO path 

With these TFs, and the recently measured+fit new AO TF, here are the open loop gains of the slow, digital, SqrtInv-sensed MCL CARM and fast, analog, REFLDC-sensed AO CARM loops for the region of offsets we've achieved and a little lower. The slow digital loop includes the 1k LP that we have used in the past, in addition to the normal CARM filters. I still need to figure out the right sequence of ( offset reduction / crossover frequency motion / overall gain adjustment ) that gets the coupled cavity resonance solidly within the loop bandwidth. 

 

Purpose

We want to characterize the sort of response the fibers have to temperature gradients along them (potentially altering indices of refraction, etc.)

Experimental Setup

I have constructed a sort of two chambered "calorimeter" (by which I mean some coolers and other assorted pieces of recycling.)

The idea is that half of the length of PM fiber resides in one chamber, and the other in the other.

One chamber will remain at an uncontrolled, stable temperature (as measured by thermocouple probe) while the other's temperature is varied using a heat gun.

Using this setup, one can measure losses in power, and effects on polarization within the fiber.

Caveat

This is currently living on the electronics bench until tomorrow morning, and is a little fragile, just in case it needs to be moved.

 Because of the limited table space inside?  That's the main reason I can think of that this method is hard.  Am I missing something?

Got the idea of ASC.

- Oplevs for PR2, PR3 => PR2 seems OK. PR3 almost impossible. well turned out not too crazy. We need outside electronics.

- RF QPD => not trivial and very technical but possible. All outside work.

- Better TT => might be a good solution.

 End PDH - good point, thanks.

ASC - Yes, this is so that we can use the POP QPD to feed back to the common ETMs after the CARM offset is already quite small.  We will not use POP DC QPD for PRC any more. 

Also, for future PRC ASC, I keep coming back to this in my head, but maybe it is less painful to install oplevs for PR2, PR3 than it would be to make an RF QPD.  Neither is going to be trivially easy.  But if we had sensors of the tip tilt motions, we could feed all of that back to the PRM to stabilize the PRC.

 - ALS

End PDH UGF improvement / post mixer LPF investigation (with in 2 weeks)

- MC/FSS

Riju measured the MC REFL PD transimpedance. See ELOG and related.

- ASC

Why do we want to see less PRM motion? I thought PRC motion was causing
LSC issue of the central part. We wanted to maximize the PRM effect, don't we?
(Or is this to supress ETM motion during full lock?)

 I did the calculation, and I reduced the beam Path. In my calculation, I restricted the waist size at the WFSs to be between 1mm-2mm also the other parameter is that the Gouy Phase different between the WFSs have to be 90 degrees. I also try to minimize the amount of mirrors used. I found the Gouy phase to be 89.0622 degrees between the WFSs and the following table shows the solution that I got from a la mode:

  label                         z (m)                   type               parameters         
    -----                         -----                    ----                  ----------         
    MC1                    0                        flat mirror           none:            
    MC3                    0.1753               flat mirror           none:            
    MC2                   13.4587              curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700 (m)       
    Lens1                 28.8172              lens                   focalLength: 1.7183(m)
    BS2                    29.9475              flat mirror           none:            
    First Mirror         30.0237              flat mirror           none:            
    Lens3                 30.1253              lens                  focalLength: -0.100 (m)
    Lens2                 30.1635              lens                 focalLength: 0.1250(m)
    WFS1                 30.2269              flat mirror         none:            
    Second Mirror    30.2650              flat mirror         none:            
    Third Mirror       30.5698              flat mirror         none:            
    Lens4                30.8113              lens                  focalLength: -0.075 (m)
    WFS2                31.0778              flat mirror         none:            

In the first image attached below is the a la mode solution that show the waist size in the first WFS, and I used that solution to calculate the solution of the waist size for the second WFS, which is shown in figure 2. I photoshop a picture to illustrate how the new setup it supposed to look like. 

(Updated as of 4pm)

[Jenne, Rana]

* Decided that earlier mode hop scan won't give us the information that we were hoping for.  We need to think about where we can actually see the frequency change.  Can we use the IR beatnote that we will soon have to do this?  We'd only be able to scan one laser temp at a time, but that's okay.  Leave, say, the PSL temperature alone, and scan one of the end laser temps.  Using the PSL as the reference, we will be able to see if the frequency of the end laser goes crazy and jumpy as we pass through a certain temp.  Then, repeat while holding the end laser constant and scan the PSL.  Thoughts?

* Meditated on PSL oplev servo, but I need to make a Matlab script that can evaluate different loops according to a cost function based on elog 9690. 

* Aligned IFO to IR, then greens to arms (got back to 0.9 for GTRY, but only about 0.5 for GTRX, with the PSL green shutter closed).  Then aligned green beams on the PSL table, since the PSL green pointing had changed a bit from Q's crystal alignment tweak-up earlier today.  Beatnotes are nice and big (see elog 10381 - The Yarm is the larger beatnote, and the Xarm is the smaller one.)

* Was not able to lock ALS comm/diff and hold long enough to get both arms to IR resonance.  Also, saw that TRY's RIN was more than 50%(!!!).  We took a look, and there seems to be much more low frequency noise than there was when the spectrum in the control room was taken for the multicolor metrology paper:

* Tried to balance the ALS comm/diff input matrix, with not a lot of success.  First of all, it looks like the Xarm has overall about 10 times more noise!  We were exciting MC2 in position (~88 Hz, about 130 counts I think), and then looking at DARM_IN1 for the peak.  When DARM_IN1 was just one of the 2 ALS error signals (i.e. one matrix element set to zero), versus when both matrix elements were set to 1, we saw a factor of only about 3 in reduction of the peak height.  We were hoping to have better cancellation of this pure CARM signal in the DARM channel.  The Xarm green PDH loses lock every ~5 or 10 minutes, and when we relock it, this cancellation seems different, so we want to try again tomorrow when the ALS is locked on comm / diff, rather than just the free running ALS that we have now.  Although, if the balance of the input matrix changes lock-to-lock, we may need to consider redoing the green PSL table layout so we get a pure DARM beatnote signal like they have at the sites.

* We want to change how the watch script for ALS works, although this is a low-priority task.  Rather than looking at the control signal, we should maybe look at the sum of all the coil outputs, multiplied by a pendulum TF, and use that as a rough displacement sensor.  We want to be careful of pushing too hard at low frequencies, but we want to allow higher frequency actuation without having the watch script shut things down.

* Also, I should put on the to-do list the revamp of the ALS find IR resonance script.

There was no such script in the directory when I looked today, but I found one called HP8591E. Of course, it didn't run because it hadn't been tested from the scripts directory and pointed to some /users/nichin/ stuff.

I modified a couple of lines and then committed it and the default .YML parameter file to the SVN. It runs and produces plots continuously from the scripts directory.

*** also, as you can see, we have mostly recovered the green beat amplitudes after yesterday's FLL attack on the ALS ***

As EQ pointed out recently, we're injecting into the FSS error point just after an RF pi filter, but before the VGA. We wondered what the weird filter impedance was doing to our signal if we inject after it. I used LISO to model this FSS common section and attach the plots.

The first plot shows the TF between the Test 1 input and the AD602 VGA input. This is NOT the input that we are actually using.

The second plot shows the TF between the IN1 port (which we are actually using) and the VGA input.

Neither of them shows the 1 MHz bump that we see in the measurements, so I suspect that the board has been modified...the hunt continues. We've got to pop the top of the TTFSS and take photos and measure from IN1 to VGA input.

** FSScomm.fil is now in the LISO SVN. The following command line will run it with two different cases and cat the PDF files into one. If you use an auto-refresh PDF viewer like Okular or Mac Preview, its a nicer display than the usual GNUplot window:

./mfil FSScomm.fil; sleep 1; pdftk FSScomm_run*.pdf cat output FSScomm.pdf

Nic, Andres, and I discussed some more about the MC WFS project today. We want to shorten the proposed WFS2 path. Andres is going to explore moving the 2" diameter lens in coming up with layouts. We also want the WFS to face west so that we can see the diode face with an IR viewer easily and dump the reflected beams in the razor dumps.

We wondered about fixing the power levels and optical gain:

1. What is the MC modulations depth? What would happen if we increase it a little? Does anyone know how to set it? Will this help the MC frequency noise?
2. What is the max power on the WFS? I guess it should be set so that the power dissipation of the detector is less than 1 W with the MC unlocked. So P_diss = (100 V)*(I_tot), means that we should have less than 10 mA or ~50 mW when the MC is unlocked.
3. Another consideration is saturation. The RF signals are tiny, but maybe the DC will saturate if we use any more power. The quadrants are saturated when unlocked and ~200 mV locked. According to D990249, the DC gain in the head is 1000 V/A. The measured power levels going into the heads (w/ MC unlocked) are: P_WFS1 = 4.9 mW and P_WFS2 = 7.7 mW. We don't have control of the DC gain, but there is a 10x and 100x switch available inside the demod board (D980233). From these numbers, I figure that we're in the 100x position and so the effective DC gain between photocurrent and the DC readback voltages is 100 kOhm. Therefore, we are in no danger of optical or electronics saturation. And the unlocked photocurrent of ~40/100000=0.4 mA => 0.04 W heat generated in the diode, so we're OK to increase the power level by another factor of 2-4 if we want.
4.  We noticed that the ADC inputs are moving by ~50 counts out of 65000, so we're doing a really bad job of signal conditioning. This was previously noticed 6 years ago but we failed to follow up on it. Feh.

While checking this out, I converted the McWFS DC offsets script from csh to bash and committed it to the SVN. We need to remove the prefix 'feature' that Jamie has introduced to cdsutils so that we can use C1 again.

This afternoon Q helped me put in some temporary PDs for checking for any mode hopping behavior in our 3 main lasers. 

Q helped me install PDA55s on each of the lasers (I did the ends, he did the PSL) so that we could do the mode hop temperature check.  For the Yend, I took the leakage transmission through the first Y1 steering mirror after the laser. This beam was dumped, so I replaced the dump with a PDA55. For the Xend, the equivalent mirrors are too close to the edge of the table, so I put in a spare Y1, and reflect most of the light to a beam dump.  The leakage transmission then goes to a PDA55.  Note that for both of these cases, no alignment of main laser path mirrors was touched, so we should just be able to remove them when we're through.  For the PSL, I believe that Q took the rejected light from one of the PBSes before the PMC. 

The end temporary PDs are using the TRX / TRY cables, so we will be looking at the C1:LSC-TR[x,y] channels for the power of the end lasers.  The PSL's temporary PD is connected to the PMC REFL cable.  For the end PDs, since I had filter banks available, I shuttered the end lasers and removed the dark offset.  I then changed the gains to 1, so the values are in raw counts.  The usual transmission normalization gains are noted in one of the control room notebooks.

I did a slow ezcastep and ramped the temperature of all 3 lasers over about an hour.  Since we usually use the PSL around FSS slow slider value of zero, I swept that from -10 to +10.  Since we usually use the Xend laser at around 10,000 counts, I swept that from 0 to 20,000.  For the Yend laser, it is usually around -10,000 counts, so I swept it from -20,000 to 0.  ezcastep -s 0.2 C1:ALS-X_SLOW_SERVO2_OFFSET +1,20000 C1:ALS-Y_SLOW_SERVO2_OFFSET +1,20000 C1:PSL-FSS_SLOWDC +0.001,20000


I was looking for something kind of similar to what Koji saw when he did this kind of sweep for the old MOPA (elog #2008), but didn't see any power jumps that looked suspicious.

Here is the PSL:

The Xend:

And the Yend:

Here's the game plan for things that we need to do to get this IFO locked up. 

Red is for things that should be done today, or tomorrow if they don't get finished today (eg. laser mode hopping temperature check).  Orange is for things that will become red once the current red things are gone (eg. inferring the POP QPD gouy phase, and moving it to minimized PRM information).  Green is for things that we'd like to do, but aren't high priority (eg. X green mode matching).  Blue is for things that we should remember, but not plan on working on soon (eg. putting PZTs on the Yend table for green).

TODAY so far:

Q already did the tweak up of the PSL SHG crystal alignment.  HE SHOULD ELOG ABOUT THIS.  What was the final power of green that you got?  Do we have any record of a previous measurement to compare to?

Q helped me install PDA55s on each of the lasers (I did the ends, he did the PSL) so that we could do the mode hop temperature check.  For the Yend, I took the leakage transmission through the first Y1 steering mirror after the laser. This beam was dumped, so I replaced the dump with a PDA55. For the Xend, the equivalent mirrors are too close to the edge of the table, so I put in a spare Y1, and reflect most of the light to a beam dump.  The leakage transmission then goes to a PDA55.  Note that for both of these cases, no alignment of main laser path mirrors was touched, so we should just be able to remove them when we're through.  For the PSL, I believe that Q took the rejected light from one of the PBSes before the PMC.  He mentioned that he bumped something, so had to realign the beam into the PMC, but that he was able to get the transmission back up to 0.802, when we were seeing it in the mid 0.7's for the last several days.

The end temporary PDs are using the TRX / TRY cables, so we will be looking at the C1:LSC-TR[x,y] channels for the power of the end lasers.  The PSL's temporary PD is connected to the PMC REFL cable.  For the end PDs, since I had filter banks available, I shuttered the end lasers and removed the dark offset.  I then changed the gains to 1, so the values are in raw counts.  The usual transmission normalization gains are noted in one of the control room notebooks.

I did a slow ezcastep and ramped the temperature of all 3 lasers over about an hour.  I'll write a separate elog about how that went.

Per Q's request, I've made up a diagram of the complete FOL layout for general reference.

Can you please give us some more details on how this design was decided upon? What were the design considerations?

It would be nice to have a shorter path length for WFS2. What is the desired spot size on the WFS? How sensitive are they going to be to IMC input alignment? Are we still going to be recentering the WFS all the time?

  Calculation for the input mode cleaner

I have been working on the calculation for the input mode cleaner. I have come out with a new optical setup that will allow us increase the Gouy phase different between the WFS to 90 degrees. I use a la mode to calculate it. The a la mode solution :

   label            z (m)      type             parameters         
    -----            -----      ----             ----------         
    MC1                    0    flat mirror      none:            
    MC3               0.1753    flat mirror      none:            
    MC2              13.4587    curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700       
    Lens1            29.6300    lens             focalLength: 1.7183
    BS2              29.9475    flat mirror      none:            
    First Mirror     30.0237    flat mirror      none:            
    WFS1             30.2269    flat mirror      none:            
    Second Mirror    30.2650    flat mirror      none:            
    Third Mirror     30.5698    flat mirror      none:            
    Lens2            30.9885    lens             focalLength: 1     
    Fourth Mirror    31.0778    flat mirror      none:            
    Lens3            31.4604    lens             focalLength: 0.1000
    Fifth Mirror     31.5350    flat mirror      none:            
    Sixth Mirror     31.9414    flat mirror      none:            
    WFS2             31.9922    flat mirror      none:      

I attached a pictures how the new setup is supposed to look like. 

 In the past week, I designed and assembled coupling telescopes for the PSL and Y Arm Lasers

The Y Arm was coupled to ~5mV, and the PSL remains uncoupled.

For the next week, I'm planning on working on things like my presentation and/or final report.

Though as of last night, my computer refuses to turn on, so there may be some further "troubleshooting" involved in that whole process.

[Jenne, Rana, ericq]

No luck locking tonight, as spent a while trying to figure out the complete absence of the green beatnotes. Long story short, we ended up having to adjust the pointing on the PSL table.

Unrelated to this, we also turned on the noise eater on the PSL laser because why not. 

We hooked the BBPDs directly up to a 300MHz scope to try to see the beat as it happened. We witnessed a very strange intermittent ~800MHz oscillation on the Y BBPD, and weirder still, on both the RF and DC outputs of the PD, and the frequency was independent of the laser temperatures. This is to be investigated in the future, but was not related to the beat note state. 

Some progress was made when we took some components out, and looked at the far field of the PSL-Ygreen overlap, and saw some misalignment, and corrected it. Putting the end laser temperature in the usual area allowed the beat note to be found, with the eventual amplitude of ~-40dBm directly out of the BBPD. The Y green alignment was pretty bad throughout, so this can be improved to bring the beat amplitude up. We should also check and make sure we're well aligned to the SHG with the PSL light. We're leaving the X beat for tomorrow, now knowing that we should be able to get it with careful alignment. 

I put the PSL telescope in place, and started coupling to it.

Unfortunately, I was only able to couple about 55 uW into the "fiber coupler" (read: fiber coupled splitter). See picture below:

Additionally, I'm not sure why this is, but both of the splitters we ordered don't split equally, but to 90% and 10% in each output port.

We also found that, since we aren't using the fibers we originally intended to, the specs are a little different, and the waist we're trying to have at the collimator face is now 283 um.

I made some measurements of the FSS box today, to have TFs for a loop model, but also to see what the difference between the different inputs was. 

As a reminder, the FSS box takes the error signal from the MC servo, does some filtering, and sends out two outputs: one to the laser PZT via KojiBox and Thorlabs HV amplifier, and one to be summed with the PMC modulation signal to the PC. Rana found the schematic at D040105

The MC error signal currently enters via a port called "IN1", but there is also a "Test 1 in," which experiences different filtering. I measured the TFs from each of these inputs to both the FAST and PC outputs. There is also an IN2, that is added after the offset point, but was not able to make a good measurement, for reasons unknown. From these TFs, I inferred the difference between the PC and FAST path, as well as the difference between IN1 and Test 1 in.

Specifically, I plugged the cable that is usually connected to the MC servo output, labelled "TO FSS BOX", into the RF out of the AG4395. I then took a BNC cable from the FAST out, or PC out, and fed it into a mini circuits DC block (BLK-89-S+), and then into input A, after checking on a scope that the signal was roughly zeroed and not too huge. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the PC drive output can be pretty big, and could potentially fry the analyzer's input. Fortunately, I think I avoided this fate. 

A ~1.3 MHz bump can be seen here, which would conspire with the bump in the demod board I measured yesterday, to steal even more phase around 1MHz. Maybe we can modify the FSS box to help our gain peaking situation out. 

The data is attached.

RXA: Shazam!