March  17,  2017         ETMX laser replaced at LT 3y with 1103P, sn T8070866

I did a quick measurement of the beam size on the MC REFL PD today morning. I disabled the MC autolocker while this measurement was in progress. The measurement set up was as follows:

This way I was able to get right up to the heat sink - so this is approximately 2cm away from the active area of the PD. I could also measure the beam size in both the horizontal and vertical directions.

The measured and fitted data are:

The beam size is ~0.4mm in diameter, while the active area of the photodiode is 2mm in diameter according to the datasheet. So the beam is ~5x smaller than the active area of the PD. I couldn't find anything in the datasheet about what the damage threshold is in terms of incident optical power, but there is ~100mW on th MC REFL PD when the MC is unlocked, which corresponds to a peak intensity of ~1.7 W / mm^2...

Even though no optics were intentionally touched for this measurement, I quickly verified that the spot is centered on the MC REFL PD by looking at the DC output of the PD, and then re-enabled the autolocker.

JDSU 1103P. sn T8070866, made March 2007, output power 2.7 mW,  on pd 17,750 counts,

GV 17 March 3pm: I found the Innolight NPRO was off when I walked down to the X end earlier, possibly was accidentally tripped during the Oplev laser replacement. I turned it back on.

Finally I see what kicks the sus damping off

This 3 years old HeNe [ JDS 1103P, sn 351889 ]  has been dying for some time or just playing possum at age 1,126 days

I did not replace the ETMX oplev laser because I was unable to bring up the the C1ASC_ETMX_OPTLEV_SERVO  medm screen on laptops.

Rana suggested including some additional terms to the cost function to penalize high sensitivity to deviations in the layer thickness (L). So the list of terms contributing to the cost function now reads:

1. Thermal noise - we use the proxy function from E0900068-v3 to do this
2. Deviation from target T @1064nm, p-pol
3. Deviation from target T @532nm, p and s-pol
4. HR Surface field
5. The ratio  with dL/L = 1%, evaluated at 1064nm p-pol and 532nm p and s-pol (only the latter two for the AR side)

I did not include other sensitivity terms, like sensitivity to the refractive index values for the low and high index materials (which are just taken from GWINC).

There is still some arbitrariness in how I chose to weight the relative contributions to the cost function, but after some playing around, I think I have a solution that I think will work. Here are the spectral reflectivity and layer thickness plots for the HR and AR sides respectively. 

HR side: for a 1% increase in the thickness of all layers, the transmission changes by 5% @ 1064nm p-pol and 0.5% @ 532nm s and p-pol

AR side: for a 1% change in the thickness of all layers, the transmission changes by <0.5% @ 532nm s and p-pol

  (substrate to the right of layer 38)

I've also checked that we need 19 layer pairs to meet the spec requirements, running the code with fewer layer pairs leads to (in particular) large deviations from the target value of 50ppm @ 1064nm p-pol.

Do these look reasonable? 

We have 50 pieces in the clean cabinet.

ETMX oplev laser is dead. It will be replaced this after noon. Sus damping recovered.

The east end AC unit is arching over and running rough at CES. Called for mechanic.......

Both belts were replaced and the unit is running happily.

Yarm script running on Pianosa. Still working on visualization of the ETMX lossmap.

Loss script running again, on Pianosa this time. Due to an oversight in the code the beam wasn't actually moved across ETMY last night. This time I confirmed that the correct offset value is written as a demodulation parameter to the correct mirror degree of freedom. Script will probably run through the night. Yarm is currently misaligned but previous alignment was saved.

Your technique works Koji

This was still running at ~9.30am today morning, at which point I manually terminated it after confirming with Johannes that it was okay to do so. Judging by the StripTool traces in the control room, the mode cleaner remained locked for most of the night, there should be plenty of usable data...

Note that I re-aligned the Y-arm (to experiment further with photo-taking) at about 9.30am, so the data after this time should be disregarded...

loss map script running on Rossa that moves the beam on ETMX. Yarm was misaligned for this, most recent PIT and YAW settings were saved beforehand. This will take until late at night, I estimate 2-3 am.

The MC was sort of misaligned. It was locking on some vertical HOMs. So I locked it and aligned the suspensions to the input beam (not great; we should really align the input beam to the centered spots on the MC mirrors).

With the HOMs reduced I looked at the MC servo board gains which Guatam has been fiddling with. It seems that since the Mod Depth change we're getting a lot more HOM locks. You can recognize this by seeing the longish stretches on the strip tool where FSS-FAST is going rail-to-rail at 0.03 Hz for many minutes. This is where the MC is locked on a HOM, but the autolocker still thinks its unlocked and so is driving the MC2 position at 0.03 Hz to find the TEM00 mode.

I lowered the input gain and the VCO gain in the mcdown script and now it very rarely locks on a HOM. The UGF in this state is ~3-4 kHz (I estimate), so its just enough to lock, but no more. I tested it by intentionally unlocking ~15 times. It seems robust. It still ramps up to a UGF of ~150 kHz as always. 'mcdown' commited to SVN.

The attached is the ETMY image with the single arm locked. This was the best I could do. Here is the recipe

• Turn on SP570UZ
• Switch to "M" mode (Manual aperture and exposure)
• Set the aperture to be the widest (smallest F number) and the exposure to be maximum (15 second).
• Switch to AF mode by the lens side switch
• Use the lens dial to adjust the zoom until the OSEMs fill the central 1/3 box (i.e. 1/9 area of the field of view). If you zoom more, you can't focus the spot later.
• Use menu button to switch to ISO1600 (You are now capable to see the beam spot)
• Switch to MF mode by the lens side switch
• Use the lens dial to adjust the focus to have the sharpest image of the spot. This can be achieved at the focal distance of ~1m
• Use menu button to switch back to ISO64
• Push the shutter (I didn't use it, but you should be able to use 2sec timer)

I removed the video monitoring can and replaced it with Olympus SP-570UZ camera. It has no IR blocker. The OSEM light are dominant because I can not zoom in more.

I left the camera in place so you can try it. Leave the LEXAN plate on the glass window so no accident can happen. The illuminator is on and you can turn it off-on with the manual switch, close to the camera. Camera manual is on my desk.

As per Steve's request, I've checked the alignment of the IMC and the arms. These three cavities are locked and aligned.

I started a loss script on Donatella that will scan the beam spot across ETMY, recording the reflected power from the arm via the networked scope at the AS port until later tonight (should be done by 9 pm). ITMX is currently strongly misaligned for this, but can be restored with the saved values. I mostly adapted the mapping scipts for the scope readout but still have to iron out a few kinks, which is why I'm running this test. In particular, I still need to calibrate how much the spot actually moves on the optic and control the ASS demodulation offsets to keep the beam stationary on ITMY.

Gautam and Steve,

We did the following:

1, switched data channel  from  C1:ALS-FC_X_F_IN to C1:PEM-MIC_1_OUT_DQ   Actual connection at 1X7 rack, input C17

    Tested channel with 1Hz, 100 mV sine wave through DV

2, placed BS into the beam path so the reflected value on the PDA100A 0.1mW,  beam od ~1mm, beam path lenght 11 cm, gain 20dB 3.7Vdc

    The full output of this 1103P 2.8 mW was saturating the PDA100A

Summery :finding it to be too good to be this good

Property tag found.

16 years old Lightwave NPRO M126-1064-700, sn 415 power output is tripping continously to zero.

The Lightwave Controller 125/126-OPN-POS sn516 was used in this test. Settings were lowered to close to nominal values without any success.

One can not determine what is broken: head or controller. This NPRO head was under Manasa's desk.
 

For a few days now, the "code status" page has been telling us that the summary pages are DEAD, even though the pages themselves seemed to be generating plots. I logged into the 40m shared account on the cluster and checked the status of the condor job (with condor_q), and did not find anything odd there. I decided to consult Max, who pointed out that the script that checks the code status (/home/40m/DetectorChar/bin/checkstatus) was looking for a particular string in the log files ("gw_daily_summary"), while the recent change in the default output of condor_q meant that the string actually being written to the log files was "gw_daily_summa". This script has now been modified to look for instances of "gw_daily" instead, and so the code status indicator seems to be working again...

The execution of the summary page scripts has also been moved back to pcdev1 (from pcdev2, where it was moved to temporarily because of some technical problems with pcdev1).

What we want from the light source for the AS port light injection:

• Frequency control for locking and maintaining known offset from arm cavity resonances -> see below
• Fast extinguishing light in the IFO -> AOM first order switching

We have four possible laser sources that we can use for the injection of 1064 nm from the back:

• There are ~65 mW of IR power coming from the PSL doubling oven, of which ~2mW are used for the fiber beat box. The remaining light is currently dumped on the PSL table and would be available. It is picked off after the PMC and does not have any of the sidebands.
• There is a ~200 mW Lightwave NPRO on the PSL table that is currently unused.
• Koji said he has a ~500mW NPRO in the OMC lab that has no PZT actuation. I contacted a couple companies about fiber-coupled variable AOM frequency shifters that we can pair with this laser.
• I don't think using the high power beam of the PSL itself is a good idea, especially if we want to map the loss on the optics, because' we'll need it for the dither locking

I think for maximum flexibility it's best to fiber-couple whichever source we choose on the PSL table and then just collimate it out of a fiber on the AS table. This way if we want to add fiber-coupled modulators of any kind it's a plug-and-play modification.

Different frequency control schemes are:

• Modulate sidebands on the light and stabilize directly to the arm, using POX/Y or back-reflection at AS
  • Free-space resonant EOM
  • Free-space broadband EOM with Rich's resonant amplifier attachment
  • Fiber-coupled EOM
• Offset phaselock:
  • PSL IR: Transfer mode-cleaner stability
    • Can lock arms while measurement in progress, but will have PSL IR light on PDs
  • Green from the end;
    • Broadly tunable laser frequency and no interference from IR.

Either way we'll need a few things:

• Faraday Isolator
  • required for PDH locking, optional if we phaselock instead
• AOM
  • We have free-space available, looking into fiber-coupled ones with frequency tuning
  • Fast switching electronics
• Various fiber stuff
  • We have enough to set up the fiber coupling of one light source. I'm starting with the 200 mW NPRO but this is technically interchangable.

I'm working on how to best set this up at the AS port and interfere with normal operation as little as possible. Ideally we use a Faraday just like for squeezed light injection, but this requires some modification of the layout, although nothing that involves mode-matching.

All 3 cranes inspected by professional Fred Goodbar of Konecranes and load tested with 450 lbs at max reach on Friday, March 3, 2017

I've been sitting on some data for a while now which I finally got around to plotting. Here is a quick summary:

Attachment #1: I applied a step input to the offset of each of the six WFS loops and observed the step response. The 1/e time constant for all 4 WFS loops is <10s suggesting a bandwidth a little above 0.1Hz. However, the MC2 P and Y loops have a much longer time contant of ~150s. Moreover, it looks like the DC centering of the spot on the QPD isn't great - the upper two quadrants (as per the MEDM screen) have ~3x the cts of the lower pair.
I did not (yet) try increasing the gain of this loop to see if this could be mitigated. I accidentally saved this as a png, I will put up the pdf plot

Attachment #2: This is a comparison of the WFS error signals with the loops engaged (solid lines) vs disabled (dashed lines). Though these measurements were taken at slightly different times, they are consistent with the WFS loop bandwidths being ~0.1Hz.

Attachment #3: Comparison of the spectra of the testpoint channels and their DQ counterparts at the same time which are sampled at 512Hz. It does not look like there is any dramatic aliasing going on, although it is hard to tell what exactly is the order of the digital AA filter implemented by the RCG. Further investigation remains to be done... For reference, here are some notes: T1600059, T1400719

GV 7 March 2017 6pm: It looks like we use RCG v2.9.6, so it should be the latter document that is applicable. I've been going through some directories to try and find the actual C-code where the filter coeffs are defined, but have been unsuccessful so far...

Corrected oplev laser RIN plot at day 3

RXA:

1. to measure RIN, the lever arm should be really short, not long.
2. the beam should be 3x smaller than the active area of the diode
3. the specular beam should be dumped on a razor dump.
4. we need to make a summary page for HeNe laser testing so that we can see 24 hour specgrams of these things for ~3-4 lasers at the same time.
5. We should add specgram stuff for the existing HeNe SUM channels on the active OLs.

GV: The channel the PD Steve is using is hooked up to C1:ALS-FC_X_F_IN. As I found out today, there can be considerable RF pickup between the C1:ALS-FC_X_F_IN and C1:ALS-FC_Y_F_IN channels, which share a common 4-pin LEMO cable - this is because the rise time of the square wave output of the Wenzel dividers is <1us, so suitability of this particular channel for the RIN measurement set up has to be reconsidered. Perhaps we can use one of the six spare PEM channels over at 1X6. 

[gautam, lydia]

I pulled out the box and found the problem: the +24 V input to the amplifier was soldered messily and shorted to ground. So I resoldered it and tested the box on the bench (drove with Marconi and checked that the gain was correct on scope). This also blew the fuse where the +24 power is distributed, so I replaced it. The box is reinstalled and the mode cleaner is locking again with the WFS turned on.

Since I tried to keep the cable lengths the same, the demod phases shouldn't have changed significantly since the amplifier was first installed. Gautam and I checked this on a scope and made sure the PDH signals were all in the I quadrature. In the I vs. Q plot, we did also see large loops presumably corresponding to higher order mode flashes.

This measurement looks bogus - the difference between dark and not dark is not significant enough to believe. Need to figure out how to match better into the ADC range.

The laser got much better at low frequency as it warmed up. This laser is almost as good as the electronics?

Dark noise cal was the same today as it was 2 days ago.

The alignment wasn't disturbed for the photo-taking - I just re-checked that the spot is indeed incident on the MC REFL PD. MC REFL appeared dark because I had placed a physical beam block in the path to avoid accidental PSL shutter opening to send a high power beam during the photo-taking. I removed this beam block, but MC wouldn't lock. I double checked the alignment onto the MC REFL PD, and verified that it was ok.

Walking over to the 1X1, I noticed that the +24V Sorensen that should be pushing 2.9A of current when our new 29.5MHz amplifier is running, was displaying 2.4A. This suggests the amplifier is not being powered. I toggled the power switch at the back and noticed no difference in either the MC locking behaviour or the current draw from the Sorensen.

To avoid driving a possibly un-powered RF amplifier, I turned off the Marconi and the 29.5MHz source. I can't debug this anymore tonight so I'm leaving things in this state so that Lydia can check that her box works fine...

I installed the front panel today. While I had the box out I also replaced the fast decoupling capacitor witha 0.1 uF ceramic one. I made SMA cables to connect to the feedthroughs and amplifier, trying to keep the total lengths as close as possible to the cables that were there before to avoid destroying the demod phases Gautam had found. I didn't put in indicator lights in the interest of getting the mode cleaner operational again ASAP. 

I turned the RF sources back on and opened the PSL shutter. MC REFL was dark on the camera; people were taking pictures of the PD face today so I assume it just needs to be realigned before the mode cleaner can be locked again. 

I've attached a schematic for what's in the box, and labeled the box with a reference to this elog. 

Gautam and Steve,

Our MCREFL rfpd C30642GH 2x2mm beeing investigated for burned spots.

Atm1,           unused -  brand new pd

Atm2,3,4       MCREFL in place was not moved

More pictures will be posted on 40m Picassa site later. 

Since it would be nice to have the latest version of Matlab, with all its swanky new features (?), available on the control room computers and Optimus, I downloaded Matlab R2016b and activated it with the Caltech Campus license. I installed it into /cvs/cds/caltech/apps/linux64/matlab16b. Specifically, I would like to run the coating optimization code on Optimus, where I can try giving it more stringent convergence criterion to see if it converges to a better spot.

I trust that this way, we don't interfere with any of the rtcds stuff.

If I've done something illegal license-wise or if this is likely to cause havoc, please point me to what is the correct way to do this.

GV 18 Mar 2017: Though I installed this using the campus network license key, this seems to only work on Rossa. If I run it on the other control room machines/Optimus, it throws up a licensing error. I will check with Larry W. as to how to resolve this...

Gautam and Steve,

New JDSU 1103P HeNe oplev laser RIN was measured on the SP table with cover on.

This is the beginning of an effort to improve oplev laser noise.

The input offset on the MC length servo board changes the lock point of the length loop (by how much? need to calibrate this slider into meters & Hz).

The SUM signal on the MC WFS is ~few 1000. This is several times larger than the pit/yaw signals. This is bad. it means that the TEM00 mode on the WFS (or what the WFS interperets as a TEM00) is larger than the TEM01/10 that its supposed to measure.

So if the beam moves on the WFS head it will convert this large common mode signal into a differential one.

We moved the MC Servo offset around from -3 to +3 V today and saw that it does affect the transmitted light level, but we need to think more to see how to put the offset at the real center of the resonance. This is complicated by the fact that the MCWFS loops seem to have some several minutes time constant so things are essentially always drifting.

1. Characterize and juice up the WFS loops.
2. Figure out how to set the MC length loop offset. Is this bad offset changing the zero point of the MC WFS loops?
3. If so, it may be a source of excess jitter noise in the interferometer.

I changed the McREFL SMOO to make it easier to use this noisy channel to diagnose small alignment changes:

caput C1:IOO-MC_RFPD_DCMON.SMOO 0.1

Huh? So should we ask them to put the container back? Or do you have some other theory about ETMX tripping that is not garbage related?

ETMX sus damping recovered.

Note: The giant metal garbage container was moved from the south west corner of CES months ago.

It turned out the 'ringing' was caused by the respective other ETM still being aligned. For these reflection measurements both test masses of the other arm need to be misaligned. For the ETM it's sufficient to use the Misalign button in the medm screens, while the ITM has to be manually misaligned to move the reflected beam off the PD.

I did another round of armloss measurements today. I encountered some problems along the way

• Some time today (around 6pm) most of the front end models had crashed and needed to be restarted GV: actually it was only the models on c1lsc that had crashed. I noticed this on Friday too.
• ETMX keeps getting kicked up seemingly randomly. However, it settles fast into it's original position.

General Stuff:

• Oscilloscope should sample both MC power (from MC2 transmitted beam) and AS signal
• Channel data can only be loaded from the scope one channel at a time, so 'stop' scope acquisition and then grab the relevant channels individually
• Averaging needs to be restarted everytime the mirrors are moved triggering stop and run remotely via the http interface scripts does this.

Procedure:

1.     Run LSC Offsets
2.     With the PSL shutter closed measure scope channel dark offsets, then open shutter
3.     Align all four test masses with dithering to make sure the IFO alignment is in a known state
4.     Pick an arm to measure
5.     Turn the other arm's dither alignment off
6.     'Misalign' that arm's ETM using medm screen button
7.     Misalign that arm's ITM manually after disabling its OpLev servos looking at the AS port camera and make sure it doesn't hit the PD anymore.
8.     Disable dithering for primary arm
9.     Record MC and AS time series from (paused) scope
10.     Misalign primary ETM
11.     Repeat scope data recording

Each pair of readings gives the reflected power at the AS port normalized to the IMC stored power:

which is then averaged. The loss is calculated from the ratio of reflected power in the locked (L) vs misaligned (M) state from

Acquiring data this way yielded P_L/P_M=1.00507 +/- 0.00087 for the X arm and P_L/P_M=1.00753 +/- 0.00095 for the Y arm. With  and  (from m1=0.179, m2=0.226 and 91.2% and 86.7% mode matching in X and Y arm, respectively) this yields round trip losses of:

  and  , which is assuming a generalized 1% error in test mass transmissivities and modulation indices. As we discussed, this seems a little too good to be true, but at least the numbers are not negative.

Valve configuration: vacuum normal

Vacuum envelope: 23.5 C

RGA head: 46.6 C

[Gautam, Johannes]

c1psl finally booted up again, PMC and IMC are locked.

Trying to identify the hickup from the source code was fruitless. However, since the PMCTRANSPD channel acqusition failure occured long before the actual slow machine crashed, and since the hickup in the boot seemed to indicate a problem with daughter module identification, we started removing the DIO and DAQ modules:

1. Started with the ones whose fail LED stayed lit during the boot process: the DIN (XVME-212) and the three DACs (VMIVME4113). No change.
2. Also removed the DOUT (XVME-220) and the two ADCs (VMIVME 3113A and VMIVME3123). It boots just fine and can be telnetted into!
3. Pushed the DIN and the DACs back in. Still boots.
4. Pushed only VMIVME3123 back in. Boot stalls again.
5. Removed VMIVME3123, pushed VMIVME 3113A back in. Boots successfully.
6. Left VMIVME3123 loose in the crate without electrical contact for now.
7. Proceeded to lock PMC and IMC

The particle counter channel should be working again.

• VMIVME3123 is a 16-Bit High-Throughput Analog Input Board, 16 Channels with Simultaneous Sample-and-Hold Inputs
• VMIVME3113A is a Scanning 12-Bit Analog-to-Digital Converter Module with 64 channels

/cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1psl/psl.db lists the following channels for VMIVME3123:

Channels currently in use (and therefore not available in the medm screens):

• C1:PSL-FSS_SLOW_MON
• C1:PSL-PMC_PMCERR
• C1:PSL-FSS_SLOWM
• C1:PSL-FSS_MIXERM
• C1:PSL-FSS_RMTEMP
• C1:PSL-PMC_PMCTRANSPD

Channels not currently in use (?):

• C1:PSL-FSS_MINCOMEAS
• C1:PSL-FSS_RCTRANSPD
• C1:PSL-126MOPA_126MON
• C1:PSL-126MOPA_AMPMON
• C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALINPUT
• C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALSET
• C1:PSL-FSS_RCTEMP
• C1:PSL-PPKTP_TEMP

There are plenty of channels available on the asynchronous ADC, so we could wire the relevant ones there if we done care about the 16 bit synchronous sampling (required for proper functionality?)

Alternatively, we could prioritize the Acromag upgrade on c1psl (DAQ would still be asynchronous, though). The PCBs are coming in next Monday and the front panels on Tuesday.

Some more info that might come in handy to someone someday:

The (nameless?) Windows 7 laptop that lives near MC2 and is used for the USB microscope was used for interfacing with c1psl. No special drivers were necessary to use the USB to RS232 adapter, and the RJ45 end of the grey homemade DB9 to RJ45 cable was plugged into the top port which is labeled "console 1". I downloaded the program "CoolTerm" from http://freeware.the-meiers.org/#CoolTerm, which is a serial protocol emulator, and it worked out of the box with the adapter. The standard settings fine worked for communicating with c1psl, only a small modification was necessary: in Options>Terminal make sure that "Enter Key Emulation" is set from "CR+LF" to "CR", otherwise each time 'Enter' is pressed it is actually sent twice.

Yes, that was one of the things that I wanted to look into. One thing Gautam and I did that I didn't mention was to reconnect the SRM satellite box and move the optic around a bit, which didn't change anything. Once the c1psl problem is fixed we'll resume with that.

Speaking of which:

Using one of the grey RJ45 to D-Sub cables with an RS232 to USB adapter I was able to capture the startup log of c1psl (using the usb camera windows laptop). I also logged the startup of the "healthy" c1aux, both are attached. c1psl stalls at a point were c1aux starts testing for present vme modules and doesn't continue, however is not strictly hung up, as it still registers to the logger when external login attempts via telnet occur. The telnet client simply reports that the "shell is locked" and exits. It is possible that one of the daughter cards causes this. This seems to happen after iocInit is called by the startup script at /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1psl/startup.cmd, as it never gets to the next item "coreRelease()". Gautam and I were trying to find out what happends inside iocInit, but it's not clear to us at this point from where it is even called. iocInit.c and compiled binaries exist in several places on the shared drive. However, all belong to R3.14.x epics releases, while the logfile states that the R3.12.2 epics core is used when iocInit is called.

Next we'll interrupt the autoboot procedure and try to work with the machine directly.

The fringes seen on the oscope are mostly likely due to the interference from multiple light beams. If there are laser beams hitting mirrors which are moving, the resultant interference signal could be modulated at several Hertz, if, for example, one of the mirrors had its local damping disabled.

Using the PDA520 detector on the AS port I tried to get some better estimates for the round-trip loss in both arms. While setting up the measurement I noticed some strange output on the scope I'm using to measure the amount of reflected light.

The interferometer was aligned using the dither scripts for both arms. Then, ITMY was majorly misaligned in pitch AND yaw such that the PD reading did not change anymore. Thus, only light reflected from the XARM was incident of the AS PD. The scope was showing strange oscillations (Channel 2 is the AS PD signal):

For the measurement we compare the DC level of the reflection with the ETM aligned (and the arm locked) vs a misaligned ETM (only ITM reflection). This ringing could be observed in both states, and was qualitatively reproducible with the other arm. It did not show up in the MC or ARM transmission. I found that changing the pitch of the 'active' ITM (=of the arm under investigation) either way by just a couple of ticks made it go away and settle roughly at the lower bound of the oscillation:

In this configuration the PD output follows the mode cleaner transmission (Channel 3 in the screen caps) quite well, but we can't take the differential measurement like this, because it is impossible to align and lock the arm but them misalign the ITM. Moving the respective other ITM for potential secondary beams did not seem to have an obvious effect, although I do suspect a ghost/secondary beam to be the culprit for this. I moved the PDA520 on the optical table but didn't see a change in the ringing amplitude. I do need to check the PD reflection though.

Obviously it will be hard to determine the arm loss this way, but for now I used the averaging function of the scope to get rid of the ringing. What this gave me was:
(16 +/- 9) ppm losses in the x-arm and (-18+/-8) ppm losses in the y-arm

The negative loss obviously makes little sense, and even the x-arm number seems a little too low to be true. I strongly suspect the ringing is responsible and wanted to investigate this further today, but a problem with c1psl came up that shut down all work on this until it is fixed:

I found the PMC unlocked this morning and c1psl (amongst other slow machines) was unresponsive, so I power-cycled them. All except c1psl came back to normal operation. The PMC transmission, as recorded by c1psl,  shows that it has been down for several days:

Repeated attempts to reset and/or power-cycle it by Gautam and myself could not bring it back. The fail indicator LED of a single daughter card (the DOUT XVME-212) turns off after reboot, all others stay lit. The sysfail LED on the crate is also on, but according to elog 10015 this is 'normal'. I'm following up that post's elog tree to monitor the startup of c1psl through its system console via a serial connection to find out what is wrong.

The microscope shipped back to the vendor for credit yesterday.

I've now made a DCC page for the mirror specifications, all revisions should be reflected there.

Over the last couple of days, I've been playing around with Rana's coating optimization code to come up with a coating design that will work for us. The basic idea is a to use MATLAB's particle swarm constrained optimization tool to minimize an error function that is a composite of four penalties:

1. Thermal noise - we use the proxy function from E0900068-v3 to do this
2. Deviation from target T @1064nm, p-pol
3. Deviation from target T @532nm, p and s-pol
4. HR Surface field

On the AR side, I only considered 2 and 3. The weighting of these four components were set somewhat arbitrarily, but I seem to be able to get reasonable results so I am going with this for now. 

From my first pass at it, the numbers I've been able to get, for 19 layer pairs, are (along with some plots):

HR Side:

• T = 50ppm, 1064nm p-pol
• T = 99%, 532nm s and p-pol

       (in this picture, the substrate is to the right of layer 38)

AR Side:

• R ~50ppm for 532nm, s and p-pol

   (substrate to the right of layer 38)

These numbers are already matching the specs we have on the DCC page currently. I am not sure how much better we can get the specs on the HR side keeping with 19 layer pairs... 

All of this data, plus the code used to generate them, is on the gitlab coatings page...

Kyle took high quality images of  the three sapphire prisms using the microscope @Downs. He analyzed the images to see the radius of the groove.

They all look sufficiently sharp for a 46um steel wire. Thumbs up.
I am curious to see how the wire Q is with grooved sapphires, ungrooved sapphires, grooved ruby, grooved aluminum stand off, and so on.

OK, but the questions still stands: "Assuming we want a 1% calibration at 50-500 Hz, what is the requirement on the frequency noise PSD curve?"

ETMX sus damping recovered.  PSL enclousure is dusty at 20V rotation speed. Rainy days as outside condition.

This bulb was blown out on Feb 4, 2017 after 2 months of operation.