[Gautam, Steve, Johannes]

We put on the remaining heavy doors on the chambers (ITMY, ITMX,ETMX, in this order) this morning. On the ITMY and ETMX tables we placed old OpLev steering mirrors that are clean and baked as witness plates such that may one day provide some insight into dust accumulation on optics.

With the heavy doors on we confirmed that we were still able to lock both IFO arms and used the dither scripts to optimize the alignment. Following that we centered all OpLevs and aligned the X and Y green beams.

 We are pumping down. The annuloses are below 10 mTorr

The vacuum gauges are not communicating with the medm so there is no plot available.

The main volume pumping is stopped at P1 = 220 Torr  ( New SuperBee 174 Torr ) for overnight.

note: SuperBee was reading 791 Torr at atm and it was not set to 760 !

[Lydia, Teng]

We ran the scripts to diagonalize the damping matrices using the free swinging data from staurday night/sunday morning. The actual entries used for damping have not been changed. However, we did generate updated matrices for all the main optics (not including the mode cleaner optics, which were not free swinging over the weekend).

• The scripts appear to be mostly working as intended, with a couple of issues:
  • The plots made by makeSUSSpectra claim to be showing spectra of the individual OSEM readings, but are actually dofs calculated using the ideal input matrix.
  • The existing parameters file (for the peak finding) was only fitting the lorentz peaks to a very narrow band of data, close to the bandwidth of the spectrum. Too narrow a band means that the initial guess must be very close, and also means there are not enough points to fit to.
    • We modified a copy of the paramters file to use a wider band (~.1 Hz) for fitting, and also use updated estimates of the mode frequencies.
    • This was largely successful, but the ITMY POS peak is very close to the SIDE peak, and POS is also stringly coupled to SIDE, so the wider bandwidth fitting can't separate the peaks. (See attachment 1)
    • A longer time series, plus more accurate initial guesses for the resonance frequencies, would allow us to fit to a smaller (~.03 Hz) band without encountering the stated issues.
    • A better way than manually examining plots to choose an initial frequency guess would be to automatically start at the overall maximum point in the spectrum between 0.4 and 1.5 Hz
• Most of the diagonalization results seem good: "Badness" numbers of 4-6 and secondary peaks very supressed or absent on spectra plotted in dof basis (See attachment 2). ITMY, perhaps beacuse of a related issue, has phase problems with the matrix elements that result in messages like "osem/dof 2/1 is imaginary."

The beam splitter that directs light into the MC REFL photodiode has not been replaced; there is still a mirror there. Gautam suggested we wait to replace it until the PSL shutter is open so the beam can be aligned. However, this must be done before going to high power.

GV addendum: What I suggested was to try and recover the arm alignment using the current low power configuration after pumpdown - since we were well aligned just before pumpdown, we should be able to recover this alignment pretty easily at low power. After locking both arms and running the dither align (also center all Oplevs), we can go ahead do the following:

• Replace mirror in MC Refl path with 10% reflection BS (Johannes, Lydia and I confirmed that this is on the AP table earlier today). Then align the reflected beam onto the PD using the tiny mirror
• Replace HR mirror in Transmon path at the EY table
• Replace ND filters on Transmon QPDs at EX and EY tables
• Repalce ND filter on Transmon CCD at EY table
• Revert MC autolocker to the nominal version instead of the low power version we have been using during the vent
• Turn up MC to nominal power by rotating the wave plate on the PSL table - confirm that we have nominal levels by measuring with power meter
• Recover single arm locks, green beatnotes etc at nominal operating conditions
   

Last night from 8:30 pm to 8:30 am PDT, ETMY UL signal was glitchy again. As of now it seems to have quieted back down, but we pushed on the cables on the board at the Y end to hopefully prevent it from coming back. After doing so it still seems to be behaving well.

P1 IFO pressure is 1 mTorr, valve configuration: vacuum normal, annulosses are pumped, RGA is off, not pumped.

THANKS to Chris !

The shutters can be opened with high power.

No communication error message still exist.

I will reboot c1vac1 and c1vac2 to get gauge communication with medm tomorrow.

[Lydia,Teng]

Something strange happened to the ITMX osem reading around 4.pm. PDT as shown below.

Also the there was no response of the reading as we adjusted the PITCH and YAW. :(

Note that we restarted the slow machine: c1susaux,c1ausex this afternoon because of the unresponced interface.

[Lydia, Teng]

We continued to work on the diagonalization scripts today and devised a way of choosing starting parameters that seems to work much better, and is easier to use, than tuning up to 15 parameters by hand per optic.

• As before, the spectrum for each dof is estimated by using the "ideal" input matrix.
• The starting guess for the peak frequency for each dof is the bin which achieves the maximum value of the spectrum between 0.4 and 1.5 Hz.
• If another dof has a higher value at that frequency, the next highest peak is used. (Sometimes, for example, the peak in PIT at the POS frequency is stronger than the real POS peak!)
• The peak height is initially guessed to be the spectrum value at the initial frequncy guess.
• The width paramter Q can still be read from a file, but for all the times we tried, the peaks were found successfully if Q was initially guessed to be 300, so there might be no need to do this.
• Spectra should still be examined to make sure the results make sense, and once we look at free swinging data in vacuum, we should compare the frequency results to the wiki values.
• Reasonably good matrix values are saved to peakFit/inMats/1157630417. We got good diagonalization results for all but ITMY (see below). The values used for damping have not been overwritten.

We still noticed phase problems with ITMY, which appear to be preventing good diagonalization (See Attachment 1). Almost every degree of freedom has a significant imaginary part in the sensing matrix. We looked at the phases of the cross spectra in DDT and saw that indeed, the OSEM signals do not have the appropriate relative phases at the peak frequencies, especially in PIT and YAW (see Attachment 2: the phase at the peak is about 30 degrees when it should be 180). These phases are different for data takes ~24 hours apart, but are still wrong. We also looked at this information for ETMY and saw the correct behavior. We temporarily moved the pitch and yaw sliders for ITMY and looked at the OSEM response on a striptool, and the signals moved in the expected way. Can anyone suggest a reason why this would be happening? Is there another stretch of data (besides this past weekend) which would be good to compare to?

I believe that the UR and LR magnets are stuck. There was no earth quake at 16:18 yesterday. Something had to kick it into this position. See 4days plot

Please advise  freeing details.

The pumpdown started at 9-12-2016

The IFO is at 5e-5 Torr vacuum normal after 73 day at atm.

ITMX needed to be freed and ETMY-UL is still misbehaving occasionally.

New pirani   and cold cathode gauges added at this vent. They were baked at 100 C for 6 hrs under vacuum.

Go to the Vac Rack to read IFO pressure from the gauge itself when Vac. Monitor is blank as it is now !

Today's summary:

• Replaced mirror in MC REFL path with R=10% BS and aligned beam on PD while still at low power
• Replaced HR mirror in Transmon path at EY table with 50/50 BS. Alignment onto QPD not yet confirmed because we need IR from the YARM for it.
• Put ND filters back on Transmon QPDs at both X and Y ends. For now I put all the filters on, for a combined OD of 1.6 at both ends (1.0 + 0.6 at YEND and 1.0 + 0.4 + 0.2 at XEND).
• Put ND filter back on Transmon CCD on EY table.
• Reverted MC autolocker to nominal, high power version.
• Raised PSL output power back to nominal level by turning the waveplate. At the PSL shutter I measured a power of 1.03W. It occured to me too late that I realigned the PMC only afterwards and increased its transmission by a few percent, so I'll have to re-measure the actual PSL power.
• MC is locked with its transmission back up to ~15,400 counts. The autolocker is not very good at obtaining the lock, as it seems to try to turn the VCO gain up too far and loses lock. The script probably needs a revision.
• The YARM was pretty badly aligned. We used the green light to visually center the beam on the test masses AND had to go exploring with the TTs to see IR flashes in the first place. We got the YARM to lock to IR and were able to run the dither alignment. The maximum transmission we saw was on the order of 0.85. However, something strange is happening with the LSC control of the armlength. When the lock is engaged it drives PIT and YAW, which manifests itself in the OpLev signal and variable transmitted power on the TRY PDs. Osamu helped us diagnose this and was able to reduce the effect by tuning the POS gains to the individual ETMY OSEMS. The problem persisted even after using the new matrix diagonalization coefficients, we'll have to investigate this further and also take a look at the filters in the feedback path.
• ITMX is still stuck and way out of alignment, so we couldn't even start with the green light in the XARM.

When I restarted c1susaux yesterday, I didn't know that I needed to disable the coil outputs first. So when it came back online, it attempted to damp all the vertex area optics and ITMX got stuck

We should make a note in the Computer Restart Procedures wiki page indicating the importance of disabling the coils before rebooting c1susaux, c1auxex, and c1auxey. Today c1auxey was rebooted properly without incident. If the slider values etc go back to their previous values on their own, is it necessary to do a BURT restore? I tried doing one for c1susaux today and there were some errors for ASC channels, but the alignment sliders went right back to the proper place after reboot yesterday.

Today the main optics were free swinging for several hours, so I attempted diagonalization in vacuum.

• ITMY still has bad phases. I looked at the spectra for this and other optics, and it looks like the other optics have the 60Hz line notched out for all coils while ITMY only has it notched on the side coil. (Using C1:SUS-ITMY_SENSOR channels). Where is this controlled from, and could it be the source of the issue? 
  • I tried using a different coil as the "standard," with the other coils compared against it in tfestimate. Default is UL, I tried UR and LL. The phase problems were still present for ITMY, but the script was still working fine for other optics.
  • The phase difference between coils is different for different start times.
  • A short segment of the time series for ITMY shows significantly more high frequency noise than for other optics at the same time.
• The ETMY matrix for vacuum has the wrong sign for UL coupling to pitch! The diagonalization results look OK on the graph, but the butterfly mode still has small peaks (See attachment 1). When the individual coil spectra are plotted, the angular degrees of freedom show very weak coupling for UL to pitch, and LL to yaw. We initially replaced the matrix on the MEDM screen with the one generated by the script. After realizing this, the PIT row was changed to 1 1 -1 -1 0, but the effectiveness of the damping on the locked transmission fluctuations was about the same both ways.

IFO pressure 3.7e-5 Torr at new cold cathode InstruTech - Hornet

New items in vacuum:

1, ETMX sus tower with new baked sus wire, EP30-2 epoxied magnets, same at different locations also........ ..........  and 2 ruby wirestandoffs.

2, First Contact cleaned arm test masses only. This technic was a 1st time use in our vacuum system.

3, 50 mm ID green glass baffles at the ends

4, witness mirrors at ETMX and ITMY (old oplev mirrors) We observed a very dusty system: sides of optics, towers and tables were wiped. Hepa tents used at Y arm and BS

5, new pirani, cc gauge and 1.5" right angle valve

[Teng, Lydia]

• We fixed the 60Hz filter on ITMY. This improved the phase problems somewhat but one coil (UL) is still about 12 degrees out of phase compared to the others for all the dofs. Is there some other place where a filter coule be applied to just one coil sensor? I pressed the "Load coefficients" button for UL, so maybe that will have helped.
• We want to interpret the coil signals to have an accurate measurement of each dof. This means what the input matrix should describe is the dependence of each dof on the OSEM signals, which is found by inverting the matrix which describes the sensitivity of each OSEM to changes in that degree of freedom.
  • We looked at the spectra of the individual coils for ITMY and ETMY (See attachment 1 & 2). The coupling between some coils and applicable resonance peaks is very weak (~0.1 times the sensitivity of the other coils).
  • However, when a certain degree of freedom, e.g. pitch, is deliberately driven using awggui, the response of the ITMY coils is clear on the StripTool and is about the same magnitude for all of the face OSEMS. So, it seems like the diagonalization script does not always succeed at measuring the relative sensitivity of the OSEMs to the degrees of freedom.
  • This may be because the fundamental swing modes experienced by the free swinging pendulum are not the same as what we measure as pitch, yaw, etc. This could be possible if the wire tension is not the same on both sides. For ITMY, the spectra imply that the funamdental frequencies are actually at some linear combinations of pitch and yaw, swinging about a diagonal axis that results in a much weaker response for some of the OSEMS. Calling these peaks pitch and yaw may be inaccurate. Certainly they do not indicate the true relative sensitivity of the coils.
  • We propose an alternate approach to measuring this sensitivity: drive one dof at a time with awggui, take a spectrum (less resolution is ok because we already know the drive frequency), and measure the sensing matrix values for that dof the same way as before, but using a spectral peak that decribes motion that we know is purely pitch. Repeat this for all 4 dofs that we can actuate on, then compile these results into a sensing matrix and take the inverse.

South end flow bench and both clean room assembly flow benches measured zero counts for 0.3 and 0.5 micron size particales.

The counting efficiency of 0.5 micron is 100%

The PSL HEPA performance was measured at the center of the table with MET ONE #3

[Lydia, Teng]

We built matrices for ITMY and ETMY by driving one degree of freedom at a time with awggui, while the damping was on. These have been applied to the damping loops.

• Each segment of data is 1000s long and each dof was driven at 0.25 Hz.
• These matrices are much closer to the ideal matrix and have no wrong signs. We believe they represent the relative sensitivity of the OSEMs to the degrees of freedom much more accurately. This is because the free swinging modes are not actually pitch, yaw, etc, but some linear combination of these. However, the damping actuates on pitch, yaw, etc. So we should isolate the degrees of freedom by driving them one at a time instead of just looking at free swinging peaks.
  • Attachment 1: An example of the dof spectra, calculated using the default input matrix, when ETMY YAW was driven at 0.25 Hz.
  • Attachment 2: The same OSEM sensor data, with the dofs calculated using the matrix found from this data. There is still a significant peak in pitch, but the other dofs are significantly suppressed.
  • Attahcment 3: The same data again, but the dofs are measured with the input matrix calculated by the free swinging data. This achieves much less suppression than the new matrix. Obviously this is not exactly a fair comparison because the new matrix was generated with this data, but the method of measuring OSEM responses by driving peaks has a much close relationship between what it measured (the OSEM response), and how the matrix is used (by damping loops which drive the coils in much the same way as awggui).
• The phase problems seem to be mostly solved. Both Y arm test masses have some phase warnings, but they mostly occur with side. This can happen because the ideal matrix elements are 0, so the real parts are small. If there is no strong coupling then there is no reason to expect the background spectrum to be in phase with the peak. Other phase differences are small; most less than 5 degrees, a couple between 5 and 10 degrees. This may still merit further investiagtion.
• Comparing the damping results for ITMY with the old (based on free swinging data) and new (based on driven data), we see the 1Hz peak suppressed by ~35% and the noise above 1Hz generally suppressed by ~25-30% . There is, however, significantly more movement between 0.5 and 1 Hz, maybe because the fundamental physical modes are not being directly measured and suppressed. Overall this seems like an improvement.

GPS times:

ITMY

Pitch:1158085097 Yaw: 1158086537 Pos: 1158089237 Side: 1158087977

ETMY

Pitch: 1158095897 Yaw: 1158097577 Pos: 1158099377 Side: 1158100817

Today the Y arm was locking fine. The alignment had drifted somewhat so I ran the dither and TRY returned to ~0.8. However, the mode cleaner has been somewhat unstable. It locked many times but usually for only a few minutes. Maybe the alignment or autolocker needs to be adjusted, but I didn't change anything other than playing with the gain sliders (which didn't seem to make it either better or worse).

ITMX is still stuck.

All is not lost. I've stuck and unstuck optics around a half dozen times. Can you please post the zoomed in time series (not trend) from around the time it got stuck? Sometimes the bias sliders have to be toggles to make the bias correct. From the OSEM trend it seems like it got a large Yaw bias. May also try to reseat the satellite box cables and the cable from the coil driver to the cable breakout board in the back of the rack.

Here's the timeseries plots. I've zoomed in to right after the problem- did you want before? We pretty much know what happened: c1susaux was restarted from the crate but the damping was on, so as soon as the machine came back online the damping loops sent a huge signal to the coils. (Also, it seems to be down again. Now we know what to do first before keying the crate.) It seems like both right side magnets are stuck, and this could probably be fixed by moving the yaw slider. Steve advised that we wait for an experienced hand to do so. 

susaux is responsible for turning on/off the inputs to the coil driver, but not the actual damping loops. So rebooting susaux only does the same as turning the watchdogs on/off so it shouldn't be a big issue.

Both before and after would be good. We want to see how much bias and how much voltage from the front ends were applied. l1susaux could have put in a huge bias, but NOT a huge force from the damping loops. But I've never seen it put in a huge bias and there's no way to prevent this anyway without disconnecting cables.

I think its much more likely that its a little stuck due to static charge on the rubber EQ stop tips and that we can shake it lose with the damping loops.

[ericq, Steve]

ITMX is free, OSEM signals all rougly centered. 

This was accomplished by rocking the static alignment (i.e. slow controls) pitch and yaw offsets until the optic broke free. This took a few volts back and forth. At this point, I tried to find a point where the optic seemed to freely swing, and hopefully have signals in all 5 OSEMS. It seemed to be free sometimes but mostly settling into two different stationary states. I realized that it was becoming torqued enough in pitch to be leaning on the top-front or top-back EQ stops. So, I slowly adjusted the pitch from one of these states until it seemed to be swinging a bit on the camera, and three OSEM signals were showing real motion. Then, I slowly adjusted the pitch and yaw alignments to get all OSEMS signals roughly centered at half of their max voltage.

In order to figure out the difference betweent simulated result and measurement, I tried to measuren the electronic noise by following ways as show in attachment 1

1.measure from the satellite box by SR785 at ETMY ,calibrate to counts by divide by 3267.8. while at that conditin, the set up is in suspension.

2. measure after ADC by diagnostics test tools, with set up on table in history and on uspension currently.

3. use the caculated butterfly channel.

the results are shown in attachmemt 2. The overall nosie level are still much higher than simulation.

http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/2092/which-figure-type-to-use-pdf-or-eps

[ericq, Lydia, Teng]

Brief summary of this afternoon's activities:

• PMC alignment adjusted (Transmission of 0.74)
• IMC locked, hand aligned. Tranmission slightly over 15k. Measured spot positions to be all under 2mm.
• Set DC offsets of MC2 Trans + WFS1 + WFS2 (WFS2 DC offsets had wandered so much that DC "centered" left some quadrants almost totally dark)
• Set demod offsets of WFS1+WFS2
  • Note to self: WFS script area is a mess. I can never remember which scripts are the right ones to run. I should clean this up
• WFS loops activated, tested. All clear.
• Locked Yarm, dither aligned. Transmission 0.8
• Moved BS to center ITMY reflection on AS camera
• Misaligned ETMY, aligned PRM to make a flashing PRY AS beam. REFL camera spot confirmed to be on the screen, which is nice
• Wandered ITMX around until its AS spot was found. ITMX OSEMs not too far from their half max. (todo: update with numbers)
• Wandered SRM around until full DRMI flashes seen
• Centered all vertex oplevs
• Made a brief attempt at locking X arm, could only get some crazy high order mode to lock. BS and ITMX alignments have changed substantially from the in-air locks, so probably need to adjust ETMX much more.

Addendum: I had a suspicion that the alignment had moved so much, we were missing the TRX PDs. I misaligned the Y arm, and used AS110 as a proxy for X arm power, as we've done in the past for this kind of thing. Indeed, I could maximize the signal and lock a TM00 mode. Both the high gain PD and QPD in the TRX path are totally dark. This needs realignment on the end table.

Rana suspicious. We had arms locked before pumpdown with beams on Transmon PDs. If they're off now, must be beams are far off on the mirrors. Try A2L to estimate spot positions before walkin the beams too far.

REF33 was removed for taking picture of the bare C30362 InGaAs photodiode per Rana's request. All other rf photodiodes have their glass cover on.

Note: it is back to it's place but this pd will need alignment!

The small steering mirror was completly lose before it was removed.

The misalignment wasn't as bad as I had intially feared; the spot was indeed pretty high on ETMX at first. Both transmon QPDs did need a reasonable amount of steering to center once the dither had centered the beam spots on the optics.

Arms, PRMI and DRMI have all been locked and dither aligned. All oplevs and transmon QPDs have been centered. All AS and REFL photodiodes have been centered. 

Green TM00 modes are seen in each arm; I'll do ALS recovery tomorrow. 

Good 8 hours

Rana came by and freed ITMX again. I think it shouldn't be a problem for me to free it if it happens again. 

In hopes of getting better SNR on the free swing spectra, we kicked all optics at around 7pm. The damping should come back on a little after midnight. ITMX did not get stuck after this kick. 

We moved the Acromag and its power supply to the X end, where we connected it to the diagnostic output of the NPRO controller. We renamed the channels to be descriptive of the pin outputs as described in the laser manual. We were able to recover readouts similar to those we found with a multimeter. 

We should figure out how to set up the channels on the front end machines: right now they are accessed through a tmux session running on pianosa. Once we are confident in the operation, we will make a box to contain the Acromag and wire connections and move the setup to connect to the PSL controller. 

Just a heads up, it looks like the damping came on at around 8:30pm. Not sure why. 

I had hoped to do some ALS work, but I realized too late that we loaned our HP analyzer to Andrew. I decided instead to do some ETMX testing. 

I have a script running that'll misalign both ETMs and back by about 0.5mrad with half hour rests in between. It'll be done around 6AM.

Seems like the angular position was fairly stable, though there is some change in the ETMX pitch that could be hysterisis or normal drift. I didn't mention it explicity in the previous log, but the misalignment was purely in pitch. I'll give it another shot with a bigger misalginment, and maybe a mix of pitch and yaw.

This afternoon around 2:45, ITMX started ringing up at ~.9Hz for about a minute and then got stuck again. When I noticed this evening, I tried to free it with the alignment sliders but was unable to see any signal on UL or UR. It also looks like the damping for ITMY was turned off at the same time ITMX got stuck (not at the start of its ring up). SRM also has a spike in its motion at this time, and another one minute later that ended up with the LR OSEM at a much higher level, though the mirror does not appear to be stuck. We didn't see any strange behavior from any of the other optics.

Teng and I were working on diagnosing a problem with the ITMY UL whitening, but by the time we disconnected any applicable cables, the damping for ITMY was already off. Later we unplugged the ITMX PD whitening cables after verifying that the ITMX damping was also already off. This problem may have occured earlier, while Teng, Eric, and I were examining and pushing in the cables at 1X5 without unplugging anything.

We found that the reason for the bad phase on the ITMY free swing data is because the whitening filter for UL is not being properly turned on. We are in the process of investigating the source of this problem. Right now all the cables to the PD whitening boxes in 1X5 are switched between ITMY and ITMX.
 

The earth quake shook ITMX free for a  short while.

[Teng, Lydia]

When we plugged in the back cables yesterday on the whitening boxes after switching them, two of the ITMX PDMon channels (UR and LR) got stuck at 0. This caused me to believe ITMX was still stuck even when it was freed. However, it was left in a stuck state overnight and freed again today after this issue was discovered. The alignment sliders have been set to 0 as a safety net to keep ITMX from getting stuck again if c1susaux is restarted again. We switched the cables back and the problem was still there.

The ITMY UL whitening filter problem, which the cables were originally switched to diagnose, was also still there. Ericq suggested we turn off all the whitening filters in order to get diagonalization data that would not show a phase difference between coils. We ran the diagonalization again with all the dewhitening filters off and got much cleaner results, with no visible cross-coupling peaks remaining between the degrees of freedom (see attachemnt 1). We did not apply this matrix to the damping, however, because there are elements which have the wrong sign compared to the ideal matrix. Significant adjustments to the output matrix will probably need to be made if this result is to be used. We also verified that the phase problem had been solved in DTT, where we saw the same sign discrepancies as in the matrix below. 

Damping can be turned back on, using the old, non-diagonalized matrix currently in effect. There is enough free swing data to diagonalize ITMY now, so feel free to mess with it. 

Matrix (wrong signs red, suspiciously small elements orange):

           pit     yaw     pos         side    butt
UL    1.633   0.138   1.224   0.136   0.984  
UR   -0.202  -1.768   1.179   0.132  -1.028  
LR   -2.000   0.094   0.776   0.107   1.001  
LL   -0.165   2.000   0.821   0.111  -0.987  
SD    0.900   1.131  -1.708   1.000  -0.107  

PMC was terribly misaligned. The PMCR camera seems to have drifted somewhat off target too, but I didn't touch it.

Realigned ITMX for the nth time today.

Finding ALSY beatnote was easy, ALSX eludes me. I did a rough one-point realignment on the X beat PD which is usually enough, but it's probably been long enough that near/far field alignmnet is neccesary. 

ALSY noise is mostly nominal, but there is a large 3Hz peak that is visible in the spot motion, and also modulates the beat amplitude by multiple dBs.

It looked to me that the ETMY oplev spot was moving too much, which led me to measure the oplev OLGs. There is some wierd inter-loop interference going on between OLPIT and OLYAW. With both on (whether OSEM damping is on or off, so input matrix shenanigans can't be to blame) there is a very shallow "notch" at around 4.5Hz, which leads to very little phase at 3Hz, and thus tons of control noise. Turning the OL loop not being measured off makes this dip go away, but the overall phase is still signfinicantly less than we should have. I'm not sure why. I'll just show the PIT plot, but things look pretty much the same for YAW. 

I did some more ETMX tests. Locked arm, raised the servo output limit to 15k, then increased the gain to make the loop unstable. I saw the SUS LSC signals go up to tens of thousands of counts when the unlock happened. I did this a dozen times or so, and every time the ETM settled in the same angular position according to the oplev.

Right now, another hysteresis script is running, misaliging in pitch and yaw. Amplitude 1V in each direction. So far, everything is stable after three on/off cycles.

With the WFS and OL, we never have figured out a good way to separate pit and yaw. Need to figure out a reference for up/down and then align everything to it: quad matrix + SUS output matrix

[Lydia, Teng]

Motivated by the strange pitch/yaw coupling behavior we ran into while doing diagonalization, we looked at the oplev pitch and yaw free swing spectra for all 4 test masses (see attachment 1). We saw the same behavior there: At the peak frequencies for the angular degress of freedom, the oplevs saw significant contributions from both pitch and yaw. We also examined the phase between pitch and yaw at these peaks and found that consistently, pitch and yaw were in phase at one of the resonance frequencies and out of phase at the other (ignoring the pos and side peaks). 

This corresponds physically to angular motion about some axis that is diagonal, ie not perfectly vertical or horizontal. If we trust the oplev calibration, and Eric says that we do, then the angle of this axis of rotation with the horizontal (pitch axis) is

Where Y and P are yaw and pitch ASD values. This will always give an angle between 0 and 90 degrees; which quadrant the axis of rotation occupies can be dermined by looking at the phase between pitch and yaw at the same frequencies. 0 phase means that the axis of rotation lies somewhere less than 90 degrees counterclockwise from the horizontal as viewed from the AR face of the optic, and a phase of 180 degrees means the axis is clockwise from horizontal (see attachment 2). Qualitatively, these features show up the same way for segments of data taken at different times. In order to get some quantitative sense of the error in these angles, we found them using spectrogram values with a bandwidth of 0.02 Hz averaged over 4000 seconds. 

Results (all numbers in degrees unless otherwise specified):

ITMY
peak 1 ( 0.692  Hz):
mean: 24.991
std: 1.23576
ptich/yaw phase: -179.181
peak 2 ( 0.736  Hz):
mean: 21.7593
std: 0.575193
pitch/yaw phase: 0.0123677

ITMX
peak 1 ( 0.502  Hz):
mean: 17.4542
std: 0.745867
ptich/yaw phase: -179.471
peak 2 ( 0.688  Hz):
mean: 74.822
std: 0.455678
pitch/yaw phase: -0.43991

ETMX
peak 1 ( 0.73  Hz):
mean: 43.1952
std: 1.54336
ptich/yaw phase: -0.227034
peak 2 ( 0.85  Hz):
mean: 60.7117
std: 0.29474
pitch/yaw phase: -179.856

ETMY
peak 1 ( 0.724  Hz):
mean: 78.2868
std: 2.18966
ptich/yaw phase: 6.03312
peak 2 ( 0.844  Hz):
mean: 26.0415
std: 2.10249
pitch/yaw phase: -176.838

ETMY and ITMX both show a more significant (~4x) contribution from pitch on one peak, and from yaw on the other. This is reflected in the fact that they each have one angle somewhat close to 0 (below 30 degrees) and one close to 90 (above 60 degrees). The other two test masses don't follow this rule, meaning that the 2 angular frequency peaks do not correspond to pitch and yaw straightforwardly. 

Also, besides ITMX, the axes of rotation are at least several degrees away from being perpendicular to each other. 

[Gautam, Johannes]

I scripted a series of YARM DC reflectivity measurements last night alternating between locked state and unlocked state (with ETMY misaligned) for measuring the after-vent armloss. The general procedure is based on elog 11810, but I'll also give a brief summary here.

• To measure the locked reflectivity the dither script is executed with a stop condition that depends on the rms values of its error signals.
• The dithering is stopped, and while the arm is locked the reflected power is recorded from both POX/POY DC and ASDC, as well as the mode cleaner transmission for normalization.
• The arm locking is switched off, and ETMY moved to is 'misaligned' position. This gets rid off unwanted mode flashes.
• In the unlocked state the same quantities are recorded.
• Rinse and repeat for a set number of times (for this run I set it to 100 and left the interferometer alone).

I did this back in June (but strangely never posted what I found, shame on me). What I found back then was a YARM loss of 237 ppm +/- 41 ppm and an XARM loss of 501 ppm +/- 105 ppm

Last night's data indicates a YARM loss of 143 ppm +/- 24 ppm after cleaning with first contact.

THIS IS STILL ASSUMING THAT THE MODE-MATCHING HASN'T CHANGED. We had however moved ETMY closer to ITMY during the vent by 19mm. Gautam and I had some trouble setting up the ALS to confirm the mode-matching, but we're in the process of recovering the XARM IR beat.

[ Gautam and Steve ]

c1vac1 and c1vac2 were rebooted and the gauges are communicating now. V1, VA6, V5 and V4 were closed and disconnected to avoid unexpected valve switching. All went smoothly.

The new ITcc gauge is at 1e-5 Torr as CC1   This is the gauge that should be logged in slow channel.

TP2 fore line dry pump was replaced this morning after 382 day of operation.

TP3 dry pump is very noisy, but it's pressure still 47 mTorr

[johannes, gautam]

Today we re-installed the fiber coupler on the X-endtable to couple some of the PSL light into a fiber that runs to the PSL table, where it is combined with a similar PSL pickoff to make an IR beat between the EX AUX laser and the PSL. The main motivation behind this was to make the process of finding the green beatnote easier. We used JAMMT (just another mode matching tool) to calculate a two lens solution to couple the light into the collimator - we use a +200mm and -200mm lens, I will upload a more detailed mode matching calculation + plot + picture soon. We wanted to have a beam waist of 350um at the collimator, a number calculated using the following formula from the Thorlabs website:

where d is the diameter of the output beam from the collimator, f is the collimating lens focal length and MFD is 6.6um for the fiber we use.

There is ~26mW of IR light coming through the BS after the EX AUX - after playing around with the 6 axis stage that the coupler is mounted on, Johannes got the IR transmission to the PSL table up to ~11.7mW. The mode matching efficiency of 45% is certainly not stellar, but we were more curious to find a beat and possibly measure the X arm loss so we decided to accept this for now - we could probably improve this by moving the lenses around. We then attenuated the input beam to the fiber by means of an ND filter such that the light incident on the coupler is now ~1.3mW, and the light arriving at the PSL table from the EX laser is ~550uW. Along with the PSL light, after the various couplers, we have ~500uW of light going to the IR beat PD - well below its 2mW threshold.

The IR beat was easily found with the frequency counter setup. However, there was no evidence of a green beat. So we went to the PSL table and did the near-field-far-field alignment onto the beat PD. After doing this, we were able to see a beat - but the amplitude was puny (~-60dBm, we are more used to seeing ~-20dBm on the network analyzer in the control room). Perhaps this can be improved by tweaking the alignment onto the PD while monitoring the RF output with an oscilloscope.

Moreover, the green PDH problems with the X end persist - even though the arm readily locks to a TEM00 mode, it frequently spontaneously drops lock. I twiddled around with the gain on the uPDH box while looking at the error signal while locked on a oscilloscope, but was unable to mitigate the situation. Perhaps the loop shape needs to be measured and that should tell us if the gain is too low or high. But ALS is getting closer to the nominal state...

Johannes is running his loss measurement script on the X arm - but this should be done by ~10pm tonight.

Some things I did last night:

I measured the X PDH OLG, and turned the gain down by ~6dB to bring the UGF back to 10kHz, ~50deg phase margin, 10dB gain margin. However, the error signal on the oscilloscope remained pretty ratty. Zooming in, it was dominated by glitches occuring at 120Hz. I went to hook up the SR785 to the control signal monitor to see what the spectrum of these glitches looked like, but weirdly enough connecting the SR785's input made the glitches go away. In fact, with one end of a BNC connector plugged into a floating SR785 input, touching the other end's shield to any of the BNC shields on the uPDH chassis made the glitches go away.

This suggested some ground loop shenanigans to me; everything in the little green PDH shelves is plugged into a power strip which is itself plugged into a power strip at the X end electronics rack, behind all of the sorensens. I tried plugging the power strip into some different places (including over by the chamber where the laser and green refl PD are powered), but nothing made the glitches go away. In fact, it often resulted in being unable to lock the PDH loop for unknown reasons. This remains unsolved.

As Gautam and Johannes observed, the X green beat was puny. By hooking up a fast scope directly to the beat PD output, I was able to fine tune the alignment to get a 80mVpp beat, which I think is substaintially bigger than what we used to have. (Is this plus the PDH gain changed really attributable to arm loss reduction? Hm)

However, the DFD I and Q outputs have intermittent glitches that are big enough to saturate the ADC when the whitening filters are on, even with 0dB whitening gain, which makes it hard to see any real ALS noise above a few tens of Hz or so. Turning off the whitening and cranking up the whitening gain still shows a reasonably elevated spectrum from the glitches. (I left a DTT instance with a spectrum on in on the desktop, but forgot to export...) The glitches are not uniformly spaced at 120Hz as in the PDH error signal. However, the transmitted green power also showed intermittant quick drops. This also remains unsolved for the time being. 

[gautam, johannes]

I started a script on Friday night to collect some data for a reflection armloss measurement of the XARM. Unfortunately there seemed to have been a hickup in some data transfer and some errors were produced, so we couldn't really trust the numbers.

Instead, we took a series of manual measurements today and made sure the interferometer is well behaved during the averaging process. I wrote up the math behind the measurement in the attached pdf.

The numbers we used for the calculations are the following:

• alpha = 91.2% from elog 6859 
• m1=0.179  and  m2=0.226 from elog 11745

While we average about 50 ppm +/-15 ppm for the XARM loss with a handful of samples, in a few instances the calculations actually yielded negative numbers, so there's a flaw in the way I'm collecting the data. There seems to be a ~3% drift in the signal level on the PO port on the order of minutes that does not show in the modecleaner transmission. The signals are somewhat small so we're closing the shutter over night to see if it could be an offset and will investigate further tomorrow. I went back and checked my data for the YARM, but that doesn't seem to be affected by it.

[ericq, gautam]

We poked around trying to figure out the X PDH situation. In brief, the glitchiness comes and goes, not sure what causes it. Tried temp servo on/off and flow bench fan on/off. Gautam placed a PD to pick off the pre-doubler AUX X IR light to see if there is some intermittant intensity fluctuation overnight. During non-glitchy times, ALSX noise profile doesn't look too crazy, but some new peak around 80Hz and somewhat elevated noise compared to historical levels above 100Hz. It's all coherent with the PDH control up there though, and still looks like smooth frequency noise...

NB: The IR intensity monitoring PD is temporarily using the high gain Transmon PD ADC channel, and is thus the source of the signal at C1:LSC-TRY_OUT_DQ. If you want to IR lock the X arm, you must change the transmon PD triggering to use the QPD.

The last good rga scan at vent 78  day 38

[gautam, johannes]

We let the PSL shutter closed overnight and observed the POXDC, POYDC and ASDC offsets. While POY has small fluctuations compared to the signal level, POX is worse off, and the drifts we observed live in the DC reading are in the same ballpark as the offset fluctuations. The POXDC level also unexpectedly increased suddenly without the PSL shutter being opened, which we can't explain. The data we took using POXDC cannot be trusted.

Even the ASDC occasionally shows some fluctuations, which is concerning because the change in value rivals the difference between locked and misaligned state. It turns out that the green shutters were left open, but that should not really affect the detectors in question.

We obtained loss numbers by measuring the arm reflections on the ASDC port instead. LSCoffsets was run before the data-taking run. For each arm we misaligned the respective other ITM to the point that moving it no longer had an impact on the ASDC reading. By taking a few quick data points we conclude the following numbers:

XARM: 247 ppm +/- 12 ppm
YARM: 285 ppm +/- 13 ppm

This is not in good agreement with the POYDC value. The script is currently running for the YARM for better statistics, which will take a couple hours.

ITMX is misaligned for the purpose of this measurement, with the original values saved.

GV edit 5Oct2016: Forgot to mention here that Johannes marked the spot positions on the ITMs and ETMs (as viewed on the QUAD in the control room) with a sharpie to reflect the current "well aligned" state.

I installed a 10% BS to pick off some of the light going to the IR fiber, and have added a Thorlabs PDA55 PD to the EX table setup. The idea is to be able to monitor the power output of the EX NPRO over long time scales, and also to serve as an additional diagnostic tool for when ALS gets glitchy etc. There is about 0.4mW of IR power incident on the PD (as measured with the Ophir power meter), which translates to ~2500 ADC counts (~1.67V as measured with an Oscilloscope set to high impedance directly at the PD output). The output of the PD is presently going to Ch5 of the same board that receives the OL QPD voltages (which corresponds to ADC channel 28). Previously, I had borrowed the power and signal cables from the High-Gain Transmon PD to monitor this channel, but today I have laid out independent cabling and also restored the Transmon PD to its nominal state.

On the CDS side of things, I edited C1SCX to route the signal from ADC Ch28 to the ALS block. I also edited the ALS_END library part to have an additional input for the power monitor, to keep the naming conventions consistent. I have added a gain in the filter module to calibrate the readout into mW using these numbers. The channel is called C1:ALS-X_POWER_OUT, and is DQed for long-term trending purposes.

The main ALS screen is a bit cluttered so I have added this channel to the ALS overview MEDM screen for now..