When I came in this afternoon, I saw that the PZT voltage to the PMC had railed. Following the usual procedure of turning the servo gain to zero and adjusting the DC offset, I got the PMC to relock, but the PMCR level was high and the alignment looked poor on the control room monitor. So I tweaked the input alignment on the PSL till I felt it was more reasonable. The view on the control room monitor now looks more like the usual state, and the "REFL (V)" field on the PMC MEDM screen now reads 0.02-0.03 which is the range I remember it being in nominally. 

I manually aligned the IMC. Spot positions are all < 1.5mm. PMC trans of ~0.74, MC2 Trans of ~15400, MC Refl ~0.4, which is better than its been for some time now.

Somehow the WFS DC offsets were off, which made it look like it was impossible to center the beam on WFS2. The script for setting these wasn't working so I fixed it, ran it. WFS and MC2 trans offsets were set, WFS are back on and have been holding MC REFL nice and low for ~3 hours.

Arms were dither aligned, wrote the offsets to SDF files. Oplevs need centering. No further daqd crashes.

PSL Table doors were open, and the laser shutter was closed.

Doors have been closed, laser has been opened. 

Sorry, that was me; taking some photos of the PSL and EX mirrors.

Found it locked on TEM01 mode.

Sweets in the fridge for non-PhD holders, courtesy of the highest levels of Caltech.

It's may be the janitor's doing.

I noticed that the HEPA filers were off. They are turned on at 20%
 

The 2W Innolight was turned on.

The alignment of the PMC adjusted on the PSL table: Trans 0.737->0.749

The alignment of the IMC adjusrted on the sliders: Trans 14300->15300

WFS offset has been reset by /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/MC/WFS/WFSoffsets

Did it again.

PMC Trans ~0.739
IMC Trans ~15000

Found PMC unlocked for many hours so I relocked it. IMC relocked by itself, but the input switch seems to be flickering to fast. Also the Keep Alive bit is not flashing. 

Medium.

Previous elog entries on this:

• The situation in 2014 w/ Diego Nov-2014
• Nic Smith, Andres, and Rana have a trialogue on the IMC WFS optical gain situation (Aug-2014)
• Rana comments on MC WFS demod board in 2011.

We removed one set of the MC WFS demod board and whitening board from the IOO rack for the investigation.
The MC WFS servo loops are disabled with the EPICS screens.
Let us know when you need the MC WFS boards to be returned to the rack.

This is to investigate the signal chain and fix some issues. We ramped down the -100 V supply for the WFS QPD bias (why is it so big?), but everything else is still on. Koji is doing demod board. Rana will upload a marked up WFS whitening board schematic soon.

[Rana, Koji]

1. The response of the IMC WFS board was measured. The LO signal with 0.3Vpp@29.5MHz on 50Ohm was supplied from DS345. I've confirmed that this signal is enough to trigger the comparator chip right next to the LO input. The RF signal with 0.1Vpp on the 50Ohm input impedance was provided from another DS345 to CH1 with a frequency offset of 20Hz~10kHz. Two DS345s were synced by the 10MHz RFreference at the rear of the units. The resulting low frequency signal from the 1st AF stage (AD797) and the 2nd AF stage (OP284) were checked.

Attachment 1 shows the measured and modelled response of the demodulator with various frequency offsets. The value shows the signal transfer (i.e. the output amplitude normalized by the input amplitude) from the input to the outputs of the 1st and 2nd stages. According to the datasheet, the demodulator chip provides a single pole cutoff of 340kHz with the 33nF caps between AP/AN and VP. The first stage is a broadband amplifier, but there is a passive LPF (fc=~1kHz). The second stage also provides the 2nd order LPF at fc~1kHz too. The measurement and the model show good agreement.

2. The output noise levels of the 1st and 2nd stages were meausred and compared with the noise model by LISO.
Attachment 2 shows the input referred noise of the demodulator circuit. The output noise is basically limited by the noise of the first stage. The noise of the 2nd stage make the significant contribution only above the cut off freq of the circuit (~1kHz). And the model supports this fact. The 6.65kOhm of the passive filter and the input current noise of AD797 cause the large (>30nV/rtHz) noise contribution below 100Hz. This completely spoils the low noiseness (~1nV/rtHz) of AD797. At lower frequency like 0.1Hz other component comes up above the modelled noise level.

3. Rana and I had a discussion about the modification of the circuit. Attachment 4 shows the possible improvement of the demod circuit and the 1st stage preamplifier. The demodulator chip can have a cut off by the attached capacitor. We will replace the 33nF caps with 1uF and the cut off will be pushed down to ~10kHz. Then the passive LPF will be removed. We don't need "rodeo horse" AD797 for this circuit, but op27 is just fine instead. The gain of the 1st stage can be increased from 9 to 21. This should give us >x10 improvement of the noise contribution from the demodualtor (Attachment 3). We also can replace some of the important resistors with the thin film low noise resistors.

Summary: The demodulator input noise level was improved by a factor of more than 2. This was not as much as we expected from the preamp noise improvement, but is something. If this looks OK, I will implement this modification to all the 16 channels.

The modification shown in Attachment 1 has actually been applied to a channel.

• The two 1.5uF capacitors between VP and AN/AP were added. This decreases the bandwidth of the demodulator down to 7.4kHz
• The offset trimming circuit was disabled. i.e. Pin18 of AD831 was grounded.
• The passive low pass at the demodulator output was removed. (R18, C34)
• The stage1 (preamp) chip was changed from AD797 to OP27.
• The gain of the preamp stage was changed from 9 to 21. Also the thin film resistors are used.

Attachment 2 shows the measured and expected output signal transfer of the demodulator. The actual behavior of the demodulator is as expected, and we still keep the over all LPF feature of 3rd order with fc=~1kHz.

Attachment 3 shows the improvement of the noise level with the signal reffered to the demodulator input. The improvement by a factor >2 was observed all over the frequency range. However, this noise level could not be explained by the preamp noise level. Actually this noise below 1kHz is present at the output of the demodulator. (Surprisingly, or as usual, the noise level of the previous preamp configuration was just right at the noise level of the demodulator below 100Hz.) The removal of the offset trimmer circuit contributed to the noise improvement below 0.3Hz.

more U4 gain, lesssss U5 gain

ELOG of the Wednesday work.

It turned out that the IMC WFS demod boards have the PCB board that has a different pattern for each of 8ch.
In addition, AD831 has a quite narrow leg pitch with legs that are not easily accessible.
Because of these, we (Koji and Rana) decided to leave the demodulator chip untouched.

I have plugged in the board with the WFS2-Q1 channel modified in order to check the significance of the modification.

WFS performance before the modification

Attachment 1 shows the PSD of WFS2-I1_OUT calibrated to be referred to the demodulator output. (i.e. Measured PSDs (cnt/rtHz) were divided by 8.9*2^16/20)
There are three curves: One is the output with the MC locked (WFS servos not engaged). The second is the PSD with the PSL beam blocked (i.e. dark noise). The third is the electronics noise with the RF input terminated and the nominal LO supplied.

This tells us that the measured PSD was dominated by the demodulator noise in the dark condition. And the WFS signal was also dominated by the demod noise below 0.1Hz and above 20Hz. There are annoying features at 0.7, 1.4, 2.1, ... Hz. They basically impose these noise peaks on the stabilized mirror motion.

WFS performance after the modification

Attachment 2 shows the PSD of WFS2-Q1_OUT calibrated to be referred to the demodulator output. (i.e. Measured PSDs (cnt/rtHz) were divided by 21.4*2^16/20)
There are three same curves as the other plot. In addition to these, the PSD of WFS2-I1_OUT with the MC locked is also shown as a red curve for comparison.

This figure tells us that the measured PSD below 20Hz was dominated by the demodulator noise in the dark condition. And the WFS signal is no longer dominated by the electronics noise. However, there still are the peaks at the harmonics of 0.7, 1.4, 2.1, ... Hz. I need further inspection of the FWS demod and whtening boards to track down the cause of these peaks.

ELOG of the work on Thursday

Gautam suggested looking at the preamplifier noise by shorting the input to the first stage. I thought it was a great idea.

To my surprise, the noise of the 2nd stage was really high compared to the model. I proceeded to investigate what was wrong.

It turned out that the resistors used in this sallen-key LPF were thick film resistors. I swapped them with thin film resistors and this gave the huge improvement of the preamplifier noise in the low frequency band.

Attachment 1 shows the summary of the results. Previously the input referred noise of the preamp was the curve in red. We the resistors replaced, it became the curve in magenta, which is pretty close to the expected noise level by LISO model above 3Hz (dashed curves). Unfortunately, the output of the unit with the demodulator connected showed no improvement (blue vs green), because the output is still limited by the demodulator noise. There were harmonic noise peaks at n x 10Hz before the resistor replacement. I wonder if this modification also removed the harmonic noise seen in the CDS signals. I will check this next week.

Attachment 2 shows the current schematic diagram of the demodulator board. The Q of the sallen key filter was adjusted by the gain to have 0.7 (butter worth). We can adjust the Q by the ratio of the capacitance. We can short 3.83K and remove 6.65K next to it. And use 22nF and 47nF for the capacitors at the positive input and the feedback, respectively. This reduces the number of the resistors.

I have implemented the modification to the demod boards (Attachment 1).
Now, I am looking at the noise in the whitening board. Attachment 2 shows the comparison of the error signal with the input of the whitening filter shorted and with the 50ohm terminator on the demodulator board. The message is that the whitening filter dominates the noise below 3Hz.

I am looking at the schematic of the whitening board D990196-B. It has an VGA AD602 at the input. I could not find the gain setting for this chip.
If the gain input is fixed at 0V, AD602 has the gain of 10dB. The later stages are the filters. I presume they have the thick film resistors.
Then they may also cause the noise. Not sure which is the case yet.

Also it seems that 0.7Hz noise is still present. We can say that this is coming from the demod board but not on the work bench but in the eurocard crate.

The whitening board saids it is Rev B, but the actual component values are more like Rev. C.

The input stage (AD602) has an input resistor of 909 Ohm.
This is causing a big attenuation of the signal (x1/10) because the input impedance of AD602 is not high. And this screws up the logarithm of the gain.
I don't think this is a right approach.

The input resistor 909Ohm of AD602 was shorted. I've confirmed that the gain (= attenuation by voltage division) was increased by a factor of 10.
This modification was done for WFS2-I1 and WFS2-Q1. Also the thick film resistors for the WFS2-I1 channel was all replaced with thin film resistors.

Attachment 1 shows the comparison of the noise levels. The curves were all calibrated referred to the response of the original whitening filter configuration.
(i.e. measurement done after the gain change was compensated by the factor of 10.)

Now the AF chain is not limited by the noise in the whitening filter board. (Brown)
In fact, this noise level was completely identical between I1 and Q1. Therefore, I don't think we need this resistor replacement for the whitening filter board.

We can observe the improvement of the overall noise level below 10Hz. (Comparison between green and red/blue)
As the signal level goes up, the noise above 100Hz was also improved.

Now we need to take care of the n x 0.7Hz feature which is in the demod board...
 

I have implemented the same modification (shorting the input resistor of AD602) to the two whitening boards.

Rana pointed out that this modification (removal of 900Ohm) leave the input impedance as low as 100Ohm.
As OP284 can drive up to 10mA, the input can span only +/-1V with some nonlinearity.

Rather than reinstalling the 900Ohms, Rana will investigate the old-days fix for the whitening filter that may involve the removal of AD602s.
Until the solution is supplied, the IMC WFS project is suspended.

https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-D1400414

As it turns out, its not so old as I thought. Jenne and I reworked these in 2014-2015. The QPD whitening is the same as the IMC WFS whitening so we can just repeat those fixes here for the IMC.

PMC and IMC were aligned on Friday (16th) and Today (19th).

The PD and lens for the ringdown experiment were removed as they were blocking the WFS.

- Updated the circuit diagrams:

IMC WFS Demodulator Board, Rev. 40m https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-D1600503

IMC WFS Whitening Board, Rev. 40m https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-D1600504

- Measured the noise levels of the whitening board, demodboard, and nominal free running WFS signals.

- IMC WFS demod phases for 8ch adjusted

Injected an IMC PDH error point offset (@1kHz, 10mV, 10dB gain) and adjusted the phase to have no signal in the Q phase signals.

- The WFS2 PITCH/YAW matrix was fixed

It was found that the WFS heads were rotated by 45 deg (->OK) in CW and CCW for WFS1 and 2, respectively (oh!), while the input matrices were identical! This made the pitch and yaw swapped for WFS2. (See attachment)

- Measured the TFs MC1/2/3 P/Y actuation to the error signals

Noise analysis of the WFS error signals.

Attachment 1: All error signals compared with the noise contribution measured with the RF inputs or the whitening inputs terminated.

Attachment 2: Same plot for all the 16 channels. The first plot (WFS1 I1) shows the comparison of the current noise contributions and the original noise level measured with the RF terminated with the gain adjusted along with the circuit modification for the fair comparison. This plot is telling us that the electronics noise was really close to the error signal.

I wonder if we have the calibration of the IMC suspensions somewhere so that I can convert these plots in to rad/sqrtHz...?

WFS1 / WFS2 demod phases and WFS signal matrix

Signal transfer function measurements

C1:SUS-MC*_ASCPIT_EXC channels were excited for swept sine measurements.

The TFs to WFS1-I1~4, Q1~4, WFS1/2_PIT/YAW, MC2TRANS_PIT/YAW signals were recorded.

The MC1 and MC3 actuation seems to have ~30Hz elliptic LPF somewhere in the electronics chain.
This effect was compensated by subtracting the approximated time delay of 0.022sec.

The TFs were devided by freq^2 to make the response flat and averaged between 7Hz to 15Hz.
The results have been summarized in Attachment 3&4.

Attachment 4 has the signal sensing matrix. Note that this matrix was measured with the input gain of 0.1.

Input matrix for diagonalizing the actuation/sensor response

Pitch

e.g. To produce pure WFS1P reaction, => -1.59 MC1P + 0.962 MC2P + 0.425 MC3P

Yaw

Now, the output matrices in the previous entry were implemented.
The WFS servo loops have been engaged for several hours.
So far the REFL and TRANS look straight. Let's see how it goes.

It didn't go crazy at least for the past 24hours.

• For the rough calibration below 10 Hz, we can use the SUS OSEM cal: the SUSPIT and SUSYAW error signals are in units of micro-radians.
• It seems from the noise plots that the demod board is now dominating over the whitening board noise.
• If the RF signals at the demod input are low enough, we can consider either increasing the light power on the WFS or increasing the IMC mod. depth.
• We should look at the out-of-lock light power on the WFS and re-examine what the 'safe' level is. We used to do this based on the dissipated electrical power (bias voltage x photocurrent).

At Hanford, there is this issue with laser jitter turning into an IMC error point noise injection. I wonder if we can try out taking the acoustic band WFS signal and adding it to the MC error point as a digital FF. We could then look at the single arm error signal to see if this makes any improvement. There might be too much digital delay in the WFS signals if the clock rate in the model is too low.

Koji responding to Rana

> For the rough calibration below 10 Hz, we can use the SUS OSEM cal: the SUSPIT and SUSYAW error signals are in units of micro-radians.

I can believe the calibration for the individual OSEMs. But the input matrix looked pretty random, and I was not sure how it was normalized.
If we accept errors by a factor of 2~3, I can just naively believe the calibration factors.

> If the RF signals at the demod input are low enough, we can consider either increasing the light power on the WFS or increasing the IMC mod. depth.

The demod chip has the conversion factor of about the unity. We increased the gains of the AF stages in the demod and whitening boards. However, we only have the RMS of 1~20 counts. This means that we have really small RF signals. We should check what's happening at the RF outputs of the WFS units. Do we have any attenuators in the RF chain? Can we skip them without making the WFS units unstable?

The WFS gains are supposedly maximized already. If we remotely try to increase the gain, the two MAX4106 chips in the RF path will oscillate with each other.

We should insert a bi-directional coupler (if we can find some LEMO to SMA converters) and find out how much actual RF is getting into the demod board.

MC unlocked, Autolocker waiting for c1iool0 EPICS channels to respond. c1iool0 was responding to ping, but not to telnet. Keyed the crate and its coming back now.

There's many mentions of c1iool0 in the recent past, so it seems like its demise must be imminent. Good thing we have an Acromag team on top of things!

Also, the beam on WFS2 is too high and the autolocker is tickling the Input switch on the servo board too much: this is redundant / conflicting with the MC2 tickler.

Oot on the streets and in the chat rooms, people often ask, "What is up with the MC_F calibration?".

Not being sure of the wiring in the c1ioo model, I have formed this screencap of today's model and put it here. The MC_LENGTH and MC_FREQ are the filter banks which would calibrate these channels. In the filter banks there were various version of a 'dewhite' filter. They were all approximately z=150, p=15, g =1 @ DC, but with ~1% differences. I don't trust their provenance and so I've enforced symmetry and fixed their names to reflect what they are (150:15). I have also turned on one filter in MC_FREQ so that now the whitening of the Pentek Interface board is compensated.

Why is this TF 1/f? It should be -20 dB/decade if MC_F is in units of Hz* and MCL is a pendulum response. Perhaps its because the combination of the Koji summing box, the Thorlabs HV driver, and the Pomona box forms an additional 1/f ? IF so, this would explain the TF we see. Once we get confirmation from Koji, we can load the TF into the MC_FREQ filter bank and then MC_F will be in units of Hz (as will the summary pages).

(along the way I've also turned off the craaaazzzy servo input enable tickling that gets put in the MC AutoLocker every April Fool's leap year - resist the temptation)

Since we have a frequency counter system here and some oscillators, I wonder if we can just calibrate the MC_L and MC_F directly using a mixer lashed up to one of the counters. If so, and we can get the stabilized laser frequency noise down below 10 mHz/rHz, maybe this is a viable alternative method to the photon calibrators. Counting zero crossings is more honest than counting photons.

The filters were made in response to a measurement of the pentek whitening boards in 2015 (ELOG 11550), but this level of accuracy probably isn't important.

Summary:

I got around to doing this measurement today, using a minicircuits bi-directional coupler (ZFBDC20-61-HP-S+), along with some SMA-LEMO cables.

• With the IMC "well aligned" (MC transmission maximized, WFS control signals ~0), the RF power per quadrant into the Demod board is of the order of tens of pW up to a 100pW.
• With MC1 misaligned such that the MC transmission dropped by ~10%, the power per quadrant into the demod board is of the order of hundreds of pW.
• In both cases, the peak at 29.5MHz was well above the analyzer noise floor (>20dB for the smaller RF signals), which was all that was visible in the 1MHz span centered around 29.5 MHz (except for the side-lobes described later).
• There is anomalously large reflection from Quadrant 2 input to the Demod board for both WFS
• The LO levels are ~-12dBm, ~2dBm lower than the 10dBm that I gather is the recommended level from the AD831 datasheet

Details:

I first aligned the mode cleaner, and offloaded the DC offsets from the WFS servos.

The bi-directional coupler has 4 ports: Input, Output, Coupled forward RF and Coupled Reverse RF. I connected the LEMO going to the input of the Demod board to the Input, and connected the output of the coupler to the Demod board (via some SMA-LEMO adaptor cables). The two (20dB) coupled ports were connected to the Agilent spectrum analyzer, which have input impedance 50ohms and hence should be impedance matched to the coupled outputs. I set the analyzer to span 1MHz (29-30MHz), IF BW 30Hz, 0dB input attenuation. It was not necessary to turn on averaging to resolve the peaks at ~29.5MHz since the IF bandwidth was fine enough.

I took two sets of measurements, one with the IMC well aligned (I maximized the MC Trans as best as I could to ~15,000 cts), and one with a macroscopic misalignment to MC1 such that the MC Trans fell to 90% of its usual value (~13,500 cts). The peak function on the analyzer was used to read off the peak height in dBm. I then converted this to RF power, which is summarized in the table below. I did not account for the main line loss of the coupler, but according to the datasheet, the maximum value is 0.25dB so there numbers should be accurate to ~10% (so I'm really quoting more S.Fs than I should be).

For the well aligned measurement, there was ~0.4mW incident on WFS1, and ~0.3mW incident on WFS2 (measured with Ophir power meter, filter out).

I am not sure how to interpret the numbers for quadrants #2 and #6 in the first table, where the reverse coupled RF power was greater than the forward coupled RF power. But this measurement was repeatable, and even in the second table, the reverse coupled power from these quadrants are more than 10x the other quadrants. The peaks were also well above (>10dBm) the analyzer noise floor 

I haven't gone through the full misalginment -> Power coupled to TEM10 mode algebra to see if these numbers make sense, but assuming a photodetector responsivity of 0.8A/W, the product (P₁P₂) of the powers of the beating modes works out to ~tens of pW (for the IMC well aligned case), which seems reasonable as something like P₁~10uW, P₂ ~ 5uW would lead to P₁P₂~50pW. This discussion was based on me wrongly looking at numbers for the aLIGO WFS heads, and Koji pointed out that we have a much older generation here. I will try and find numbers for the version we have and update this discussion.

Misc:

1. For the sake of completeness, the LO levels are ~ -12.1dBm for both WFS demod boards (reflected coupling was negligible)
2. In the input signal coupled spectrum, there were side lobes (about 10dB lower than the central peak) at 29.44875 MHz and 29.52125 MHz (central peak at 29.485MHz) for all of the quadrants. These were not seen for the LO spectra.
3. Attached is a plot of the OSEM sensor signals during the time I misaligned MC1 (in both pitch and yaw approximately by equal amounts). Assuming 2V/mm for the OSEM calibration, the approximate misalignment was by ~10urad in each direction.
4. No IMC suspension glitching the whole time I was working today

jiSome notes on the FSS configuration: ELOG 10321

It was raised at the Wednesday meeting that I did not check the RF pickup levels while measuring the RF error signal levels into the Demod board. So I closed the PSL shutter, and re-did the measurement with the same measurement scheme. The detailed power levels (with no light incident on the WFS, so all RF pickup) is reported in the table below.

These numbers can be subtracted from the corresponding columns in the previous elog to get a more accurate estimate of the true RF error signal levels. Note that the abnormal behaviour of Quadrant #2 on both WFS demod boards persists.

c1iool0 was down again. Rather than key the crate, this time I just pushed the reset button on the front and it came back.

As move towards the wonderfulness of AcroMag, we also have to buy a computer  to handle all of these IOCs. Let's install the new c1iool0 over by the SUS computer.

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

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 arrangement of filters in the WFS loop filter banks have been altered, Rana will update with details of the motivation behind these changes. Here is how the screen looks now:

I have updated the C1IOO SDF table, and also the mcwfson script to reflect these changes. The latter has been svn committed.

I repeated this measurement as follows:

1. Added a filter in the MC_F filterbank (FM9) to account for the Pomona box between the PZT control signal and the laser PZT (pole@2.9Hz). So the filter bank at the time of TF measurement looks like this:
   
2. Measured TF from driving MC2 (with C1:SUS-MC2_MCL_OUT channel) to C1:IOO-MC_F, which is the output of the above filter bank. The response is the expected 1/f^2 shape of the free optic
    
   
3. From this transfer function, the magnitude is 0.0316 ct/ct. Using the value of 6nm/ct for the MC2 actuator gain that I found in a previous elog entry, I calibrated the MC_F output into Hz using the calibration factor 3.95MHz/ct (FM10 in the above filterbank).

Here is a calibrated MC_F spectrum:

RXA: I've added this plot of the free-running noise of the Lightwave NPRO which is probably similar to our Innolight Mephisto. Seems like the laser is quieter than MC_F everywhere below 100 Hz.

What readouts do we have for the PMC length? If we could have a calibrated & whitened error and control signal for the PMC up to 16 kHz, perhaps we could see at what frequencies we can use it as a faux-RefCav.

In http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/11793 I posted the calibrated PMC free-running displcament with/without IMC locked. Unfortunately, this measurement was done with a part of the IMC electronics not perfect (https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8081/40m/11794). I did the same measurement after the fix, but there is no low freq data http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/11795.

Assuming we have the similar error signal leve in the low freq band as The entry 11793, the IMC is considered to be noisier than the PMC between 0.8 and 4Hz. But we should do the same measurement with the current electronics.

The PMC calibration can be found in this entry http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/11780

Once the RT machines were back, we launched only the five IOPs. They had bunch of red lights, but we continued to run essential models for the IFO. SOme of the lights were fixed by "global diag reset" and "mxstream restart".

The suspension were damped. We could restore the IMC lock. The locking became OK and the IMC was aligned. The REFL spot came back.

At least, I could confirm that the WFS ASC signals were not transmitted to c1mcs. There must be some disconneted links of IPC.

I had to key the c1psl crate to get the PMC locking again. Without this, it would still sort of lock, but it was very hard to turn on the loop; it would push itself off the fringe. So probably it was stuck in some state with the gain wrong. Since the RF stuff is now done in a separate electronics chain, I don't think the RF phase can be changed by this. Probably the sliders are just not effective until power cycling.

I then tried to get the MC WFS back, but running rtcds restart --all would make some of the computers hang. For c1ioo I had to push the reset button on the computer and then did 'rtcds start --all' after it came up. Still missing IPC connections.

I'm going to get in touch with Rolf.

Motivation:

To test the hypothesis that the IMC lock duty cycle is affected by the PRM alignment. Rana pointed out today that the input faraday has not been tuned to maximize the output->input isolation in a while, so the idea is that perhaps when the PRM is aligned, some of the reflected light comes back towards the PSL through the Faraday and hence, messes with the IMC lock.

A script to test this hypothesis is running over the weekend (in case anyone was thinking of doing anything with the IFO over the weekend).

Methodology:

I've made a simple script - the pseudocode is the following:

• Align PRM
• For the next half hour, look for downward transitions in the EPICS record for MC TRANS > 5000 cts - this is a proxy for an MC lockloss
• At the end of 30 minutes, record number of locklosses in the last 30 minutes
• Misalign PRM, repeat the above 3 bullets

The idea is to keep looping the above over the weekend, so we can expect ~100 datapoints, 50 each for PRM misaligned/aligned. The times at which PRM was aligned/misaligned is also being logged, so we can make some spectrograms of PC drive RMS (for example) with PRM aligned/misaligned. The script lives at /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/SUS/FaradayIsolationTest/FaradayIsolCheck.py. Script is being run inside a tmux session on pianosa, hopefully the machine doesn't crash over the weekend and MC1/CDS stays happy.

A more direct measurement of the input Faraday isolation can be made by putting a photodiode in place of the beam dump shown in Attachment #1 (borrowed from this elog). I measured ~100uW of power leaking through this mirror with the PRM misaligned (but IMC locked). I'm not sure what kind of SNR we can expect for a DC measurement, but if we have a chopper handy, we could put a chopper (in the leaked beam just before the PD so as to allow the IMC to be locked) and demodulate at that frequency for a cleaner measurement? This way, we could also measure the contribution from prompt reflections (up to the input side of the Faraday) by simply blocking the beam going into the vacuum. The window itself is wedged so that shouldn't be a big contributor.