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ID Date Author Type Category Subject
13690   Tue Mar 20 16:53:03 2018 gautamUpdateIOOIMC loop checkup

Re-measured the demod board noises after replacing the suspect ERA-5SMs, with LO driven by a marconi at the "nominal" level of 2.5dBm, and RF input terminated. Attachment #1 is the input referred voltage noise spectra. I used the FET low noise pre-amp box for this purpose. I cannot explain the shape of the spectra above 1kHz. I tried doing the measurement on a minicircuits mixer (non-surface mount) and found the shape to be flat throughout the SR785 span. Unclear what else could be going on in the demod board though, all the other components on it are passive (except the ERA-5SMs which were replaced). I considered adopting a PMC style demod setup where we do the demod using some separate Minicircuits Mixer+LowPass filter combo. But the RF flashes for the IMC monitored at the RFmon port are ~0.2Vpp, and so the RF input to the mixer is expected to be ~2Vpp. The minicircuits mixer selection guide recommends choosing a diode mixer with LO level at least 10dBm above the expected RF input signal level, and we don't have any standalone mixers that are >Level 7. I've asked Steve to package the aLIGO demod board in the meantime, but even that might not be a plug and play replacement as the IF preamp stage has ~120degrees phase lag at 1MHz, which is significantly higher than the existing board which just has a SCLF5 low pass filter after the mixer and hence has <45degrees phase lag at 1MHz.

Attachment 1: IMC_RF_noise.pdf
13692   Tue Mar 20 19:48:10 2018 gautamUpdatePEMtest setup

according to the temp sensor readout, which was ~-3.35V which corresponds to ~335K, the temperature of the can is now 60 deg C. This is a bit warm for my liking so i'm turning the heater current down to 0 now by writing 0 to C1:PEM-SEIS_EX_TEMP_CTRL

13693   Tue Mar 20 21:08:03 2018 gautamUpdateIOOIMC loop checkup

This elog by koji inspired me to consider power supply as a possible issue.

The demod board receives +/-24V DC (which is regulated down to +/-15V DC by 7815/7915), and also +15V DC via the backplane. The ERA-5SM receives DC power from the latter (unregulated) +15V DC. I can't think of why this is the case except perhaps the regulators can't source the current the amp wants? In any case, it doesn't look feasible to change this by cutting any traces on the PCB to me. While I had the board out, I decided to replace the JMS-1H mixers in a last ditch effort to improve the demod board noise. Unfortunately I'm having trouble de-soldering these MCL components from the board. So for now, I'm leaving the demod board out, IMC unlocked. Work will continue tomorrow.

13694   Tue Mar 20 22:44:45 2018 gautamUpdateIOOIMC loop checkup

After some persistence, I managed to get the mixers off.

• Having gotten the mxiers off, I decided to temporarily solder on 50ohms between the LO pin pad and ground on the demod board and measure the RF signal levels in the LO chain with the active probe again.
• Today, with this change, I confirmed that the ERA-5SM begins to saturate closer to the +19dBm advertised on its datasheet. So we need only 2dB of attenuation at the input to have 17dBm at the LO pin of the mixer, assuming 50ohm input impedance.
• But this begs the question - what does minicircuits mean by a Level-YY mixer? Do they expect YY dBm delivered to a 50ohm load? Or do we need to supply YY dBm accounting for the dynamically changing input impedance of the mixer, as monitored by a high impedance probe?
• I soldered on some new mixers (JMS-1H) I procured from Downs earlier today.
• Re-installed the demod board in the eurocrate.

Unfortunately, the coherent noise between the arms persists so the sensing noise injection must be happening elsewhere. IMC seems to lock fine though so I'm leving the autolocker on

13696   Wed Mar 21 15:52:45 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMC error point calibration

As discussed at the meeting, I decided to calibrate the MC error point into physical units of Hz/rtHz (a.k.a. the PDH discriminant). This is to facilitate the debugging of the hypothesized excess IMC sensing noise. I did this as follows.

1. Trust the POX calibration that was last updated in Aug 2017.
2. Hook up spare DAC channel (piped from LSC rack to 1X2) to IN2 of IMC CM board.
3. Inject excitation into MC error point via "IN2" input of the common board. For an excitation of 30cts with the IN2 gain at -32dB, I was able to see a peak in the calibrated X arm control signal that was ~x10 above the nominal noise level around 150Hz without seeing any nonlinear coupling effects in the DTT spectrum (I'm assuming 150Hz is sufficiently above the UGF of the X arm locking loop such that no loop correction is necessary).
4. Took a spectrum of the IMC error signal, teed off into the SR785 at the I output of the demod board with the same linewidth as the DTT spectrum.
5. Confirmed that without any excitation,
6. Did the math to make these two peaks line up. The resulting calibration is: 13kHz/Vrms.

Math details:

• DTT peak height @ 150 Hz with Hanning window, 25 avgs = 1.97e-4 nm/rtHz (See Attachment #1).
• X arm cavity length = 37.79m, using which the above number becomes 1.47 Hz/rtHz.
• Peak height in SR785 spectrum with Hanning window, 25 avgs = 1.13e-4 Vrms/rtHz (See Attachment #2).
• Dividing, we get 13kHz/Vrms.

Using this, I can now make up a noise budget of sorts for the IMC sensing.

gautam 20180327 4.30pm: I re-checked the PDH error signal calibration using the oscilloscope method. Attachment #3 shows the PDH I and Q error signals and also the output of the RF monitor port, during a TEM00 flash. This attachment should be compared to Attachment #2 of elog 12822, and the answer lines up quite well. From my Finesse model of the IMC, I calculated that the x-axis of the PDH horn-to-horn is ~12.3kHz. Comparing to the top row of Attachment #3, I get a PDH error signal calibration of ~12.4kHz/Vrms, which lines up well with the number quoted above. So I trust my calibration, and hence, the y-axis of my noise budgets in reply to this elog.

Attachment 1: IMC_PDHdisc_20180321.pdf
Attachment 2: IMC_PDHdisc785_20180321.pdf
Attachment 3: IMC_oscope.pdf
13697   Wed Mar 21 17:31:21 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMC error point calibration

I did a preliminary noise budget of the transmitted frequency noise of the IMC. Attachment #1 shows the NB. I'm going to use this opportunity to revisit my IMC modeling. Some notes:

1. The blue, green and red traces are from my measurement of the voltage noise of the demod board with LO driven by Marconi, RF input terminated, measured using the FET preamp + SR785, and calibrated into Hz/rtHz using the number from the immediate preceeding entry.
2. The grey trace is measured by closing the PSL shutter, manually engaging the POX11 whitening, and looking at the calibrated POX. This sensing noise is ~100x higher than the IMC curves - but I think this makes sense as for the IMC, I am measuring directly at the output of the demod board, whereas for POX, the signal goes through the whole whitening infrastructure first.
3. The purple trace is the calibrated X-arm control signal converted to Hz/rtHz.
4. I've only showed the region up to ~1kHz as this is where the excess noise was seen in the original ALS study that precipitated this whole investigation.

Conclusion: From this study, assuming my PDH discriminant calibration was correct, looks like IMC demod / POX11 demod electronics noises are not to blame (this surprises me since there were apparently so many things wrong on the demod board, and yet that wasn't the worst thing in the IMC chain it would seem ). The POX11 photodiode "dark" noise is also not the problem I think, given the grey curve. Next curve to go on here is the demod board noise with the PSL shutter closed but the IMC REFL PD connected to the RF input (or maybe even better, have light on the PD, but macroscopically misalign MC2 so there is no 29.5MHz PDH signal), just to make sure there isn't anything funky going on there...

 Quote: Using this, I can now make up a noise budget of sorts for the IMC sensing.

Attachment 1: IMC_RF_noise_calib.pdf
13698   Wed Mar 21 21:13:44 2018 gautamUpdateIOOIMC noise budget

I've added two curves to the NB. Both are measured (with FET preamp) at the output of the demod board, with the LO driven at the nominal level by the Wenzel RF source pickoff (as it would be when the IMC is locked) and the RF input connected to the IMC REFL PD. For one curve, I simply closed the PSL shutter, while for the other, I left the PSL shutter open, but macroscopically misaligned MC2 so that there was no IMC cavity. So barring RFAM, there should be no PDH signal on the REFL PD, but I wanted to have light on there. I'm not sure if I understand the difference between these two curves though, need to think on it. Perhaps the IMC REFL PD's optical/electrical response needs to be characterized?

 Quote: Next curve to go on here is the demod board noise with the PSL shutter closed but the IMC REFL PD connected to the RF input (or maybe even better, have light on the PD, but macroscopically misalign MC2 so there is no 29.5MHz PDH signal), just to make sure there isn't anything funky going on there...

Attachment 1: IMC_RF_noise_calib.pdf
13706   Mon Mar 26 21:40:26 2018 gautamSummaryIOOMC2 classical radiation pressure noise

[rana, gautam]

we measured the RIN of the MC2 transmission using the PDA255 I had put on the MC2 trans table sometime ago for ringdowns. Attached are (i) spectra for the RIN, (ii) spectra for the classical rad. pressure noise assuming 500W circulating power and (iii) a tarball of data and code used to generate these plots.

We took a full span measurement (to make sure there aren't any funky high-freq features) and a measurement from DC-800 Hz (where we are looking for excess noise). The DC level of light on the photodiode was 2.76V (measured using o'scope)

I'll add this to the noise budget later. But the measured RIN seems consistent with a 2013 measurement at 100Hz (though the 2013 measurement is using DTT and so doesn't have high frequency information).

Attachment 1: IMC_RIN.pdf
13707   Mon Mar 26 23:49:27 2018 gautamUpdateGeneralNew ADC Adaptor Board installed in C1LSC expansion chassis

Todd informed me that the ADC Timing adaptor boards we had ordered arrived today. I had to solder on the components and connectors as per the schematic, though the main labor was in soldering the high density connectors. I then proceeded to shut down all models on c1lsc (and then the FE itself). Then classic problem of all vertex machines crashing when unloading models on c1lsc happened (actually Koji noticed that this was happening even on c1ioo). Anyways this was nothing new so I decided to push ahead.

I had to get a cable from Downs that connects the actual GS ADC card to this adaptor board. I powered off the expansion chassis, installed the adaptor board, connected it to the ADC card and restarted the expansion chassis and also the FE. I also reconnected the SCSI cable from the AA board to the adaptor card. It was a bit of a struggle to get all the models back up and running again, but everything eventually came back(after a few rounds of hard rebooting). I then edited the c1x04 and c1lsc simulink models to reflect the new path for the X arm ALS error signals. Seems to work alright.

At some point in the afternoon, I noticed a burning smell concentrated near the PSL table. Koji traced the smell down to the c1lsc expansion chassis. We immediately powered the chassis off. But Steve later informed me that he had already noticed an odd burning smell in the morning, before I had done any work at the LSC rack. Looking at the newly installed adaptor card, there wasn't any visual evidence of burning. So I decided to push ahead and try and reboot all models. Everything came back up normally eventually, see Attachment #1. Particle count in the lab seems a little higher than usual (actually, according to my midnight measurement, they are ~factor of 10 lower than Steve's 8am measurements), but Steve didn't seem to think we should read too much into this. Let's monitor the situation over the coming days, Steve should comment on the large variance seen in the particle counter output which seems to span 2 orders of magnitude depending on the time of the day the measurement is made... Also note that there is a BIO card in the C1LSC expansion chassis that is powered by a lab power supply unit. It draws 0 current, even though the label on it says otherwise. I a not sure if the observed current draw is in line with expectations.

The spare (unstuffed) adaptor cards we ordered, along with the necessary hardware to stuff them, are in the Digital FE hardware cabinet along the east arm.

Steve:  particle count in the 40m is following outside count, wind direction, weather condition .....etc. The lab particle count is NOT logged ! This is bad practice.

Attachment 1: CDS_20180326.png
13708   Tue Mar 27 01:39:44 2018 gautamUpdateIOOPSL noise eater was off

While Kevin and Arijit were doing their MC_REFL PD noise measurements (which they will elog about separately shortly), I noticed a feature around 600kHz that reminded me of the NPRO noise eater feature. This is supposed to suppress the relaxation oscillation induced peak in the RIN of the PSL. Surprisingly, the noise eater switch on the NPRO front panel was set to "OFF". Is this the normal operating state? I thought we want the noise eater to be "ON"? Have to measure the RIN on the PSL table itself with one of the many available pick off PDs. In any case, as Attachment #1 showed, turning the noise eater back on did not improve the excess IMC frequency noise.

Attachment 1: IR_ALS_20180326.pdf
13712   Tue Mar 27 23:37:35 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMC REFL PD removed

I've removed the MC REFL PD unit from the AS table for investigation. So MC won't lock.

PSL shutter was closed and location of PD was marked with sharpie (placing guides to indicate position wasn't convenient). I also kapton taped the PD to minimize dust settling on the PD while I have it out in the electronics area. Johannes has the camera, and my cellphone image probably isn't really high-res enough for diagnostics but I'm posting it here anyways for what it's worth. More importantly - the board is a D980454 revision B judging by the board, but there is no schematic for this revision on the DCC. The closest I can find is a D980454 Rev D. But I can already see several differences in the component layout (though not all of them may be important). Making a marked up schematic is going to be a pain . I'm also not sure what the specific make of the PD installed is.

The lid of the RF cage wasn't on.

More to follow tomorrow, PD is on the electronics workmench for now...

gautam 28 March 2018: Schematic has been found from secret Dale stash (which exists in addition to the secret Jay stash). It has also been added to the 40m electronics tree.

Attachment 1: IMG_6955.JPG
13715   Wed Mar 28 21:31:39 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMC REFL PD removed

I re-installed the MC REFL photodiode. Centered beam on the PD by adjusting steering mirror to maximize the DC signal level (on o'scope) at the DC monitoring port. Curiously, the DC level on the scope (high-Z) was ~2.66V DC, whereas the MEDM screen reports ~twice that value, at ~5.44 "V". We may want to fix this "calibration" (or better yet, use physical units like mW). Noise-eater On/Off comparison of MC error signals to follow.

13727   Wed Apr 4 16:23:39 2018 gautamUpdateCDSslow machine bootfest

[johannes, gautam]

It's been a while - but today, all slow machines (with the exception of c1auxex) were un-telnetable. c1psl, c1iool0, c1susaux, c1iscaux1, c1iscaux2, c1aux and c1auxey were rebooted. Usual satellite box unplugging was done to avoid ITMX getting stuck.

13729   Thu Apr 5 10:38:38 2018 gautamUpdateCDSCDS puzzle

I'm probably doing something stupid - but I've not been able to figure this out. In the MC1 and MC3 coil driver filter banks, we have a digital "28HzELP" filter module in FM9. Attachment #1 shows the MC1 filterbanks. In the shown configuration, I would expect the only difference between the "IN1" and "OUT" testpoints to be the transfer function of said ELP filter, after all, it is just a bunch of multiplications by filter coefficients. But yesterday looking at some DTT traces, their shapes looked suspicious. So today, I did the analysis entirely offline (motivation being to rule out DTT weirdness) using scipy's welch. Attachment #2 shows the ASDs of the IN1 and OUT testpoint data (collected for 30s, fft length is set to 2 seconds, and hanning window from scipy is used). I've also plotted the "expected" spectral shape, by loading the sos coefficients from the filter file and using scipy to compute the transfer function.

Clearly, there is a discrepancy for f>20Hz. Why?

Code used to generate this plot (and also a datafile to facilitate offline plotting) is attached in the tarball Attachment #3. Note that I am using a function from my Noise Budget repo to read in the Foton filter file...

*ChrisW suggested ruling out spectral leakage. I re-ran the script with (i) 180 seconds of data (ii) fft length of 15 seconds and (iii) blackman-harris window instead of Hanning. Attachment #4 shows similar discrepancy between expectation and measurement...

Attachment 1: MC1_outputs.png
Attachment 2: EllipTFCheck_MC1.pdf
Attachment 3: MC1_ELP.tgz
Attachment 4: EllipTFCheck_MC1.pdf
13731   Thu Apr 5 13:46:42 2018 gautamUpdateSUSbig earthquake

Seems like there was a 5.3 magnitude EQ ~10km from us (though I didn't feel it). All watchdogs were tripped so our mirrors definitely felt it. ITMX is stuck (but all the other optics are damping fine). I tried the usual jiggling of DC bias voltage but ITMX still seems stuck. Probably a good sign that the magnet hasn't come off, but not ideal that I can't shake it free..

edit: after a bit more vigorous shaking, ITMX was freed. I had to move the bias slider by +/-10,000 cts, whereas initially I was trying +/-2000 cts. There is a tendency for the optic to get stuck again once it has been freed (while the optic's free swinging motion damps out), so I had to keep an eye out and as soon as the optic was freed, I re-engaged the damping servos to damp out the optic motion quickly.

Attachment 1: EQ_April52018.png
13732   Thu Apr 5 19:31:17 2018 gautamUpdateCDSEPICS processes for c1ioo dead

I found all the EPICS channels for the model c1ioo on the FE c1ioo to be blank just now. The realtime model itself seemed to be running fine, judging by the IMC alignment (as the WFS loops seemed to still be running okay). I couldn't find any useful info in demsg but I don't know what I'm looking for. So my guess is that somehow the EPICS process for that model died. Unclear why.

13733   Fri Apr 6 10:00:29 2018 gautamUpdateCDSCDS puzzle
 Quote: Clearly, there is a discrepancy for f>20Hz. Why?

Spectral leakage

13734   Fri Apr 6 16:07:18 2018 gautamUpdateCDSFrequent EPICS dropouts

Kira informed me that she was having trouble accessing past data for her PID tuning tests. Looking at the last day of data, it looks like there are frequent EPICS data dropouts, each up to a few hours. Observations (see Attachment #1 for evidence):

1. Problem seems to be with writing these EPICS channels to frames, as the StripTool traces do not show the same discontinuities.
2. Problem does not seem local to c1auxex (new Acromag machine). These dropouts are also happening in other EPICS channel records. I have plotted PMC REFL, which is logged by the slow machine c1psl, and you can see the dropouts happen at the same times.
3. Problem does not seem to happen to the fast channel DQ records (see ETMX Sensor record plotted for 24 hours, there are no discontinuties).

It is difficult to diagnose how long this has been going on for, as once you start pulling longer stretches of data on dataviewer, any "data freezes" are washed out in the extent of data plotted.

Attachment 1: EPICS_dropout.png
13737   Fri Apr 6 21:39:09 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMC2 suspension health checkup

While Kevin is working on the MC2 electronics chain - we disconnected the output to the optic (DB15 connector on coil driver board). I decided to look at the 'free' freeswinging MC2 OSEM shadow sensor data. Attachment #1 suggests that the suspension eigenmodes are showing up in the shadow sensors, but the 0.8Hz peak seems rather small, especially compared to the result presented in this elog.

Maybe I'll kick all 3 MC optics tonight and let them ringdown overnight, may not be a bad idea to checkup on the health of the MC suspensions/satellite boxes... [MC suspensions were kicked @1207113574]. PSL shutter will remain closed overnight...

 Quote: Why is MC2 LR so different from the others???

Attachment 1: MC2_Freeswinging.pdf
13741   Mon Apr 9 18:46:03 2018 gautamUpdateIOOFurther debugging
1. I analyzed the data from the free swinging MC test conducted over the weekend. Attachment #1 shows the spectra. Color scheme is same for all panels.
• I am suspicious of MC3: why does the LR coil see almost no Yaw motion?
• The "equilibrium" values of all the sensor signals (at the IN1 of the coil input filters) are within 20% of each other (for MC3, but also MC1 and MC2).
• The position resonance is also sensed more by the side coil than by the LR coil.
• To rule out satellite box shenanigans, I just switched the SRM and MC3 satellite boxes. But coherence between frequency noise as sensed by the arms remain.
2. I decided to clean up my IMC nosie budget a bit more.
• Attachment #2 shows the NB as of today. I'll choose a better color palette for the next update.
• "Seismic" trace is estimated using the 40m gwinc file - the MC2 stack is probably different from the others and so it's contribution is probably more, but I think this will suffice for a first estimate.
• "RAM" trace is measured at the CM board input, with MC2 misaligned.
• The unaccounted noise is evident from above ~8 Hz.
• More noises will be added as they are measured.
• I am going to spend some time working on modeling the CM board noise and TF in LTspice. I tried getting a measurement of the transfer function fron IN1 to the FAST output of the CM board with the SR785 (motivation being to add the contribution of the input referred CM board noise to the NB plot), but I suspect I screwed up something w.r.t. the excitation amplitude, as I am getting a totally nonsensical shape, which also seems to depend on my input excitation amplitude. I don't think the output is saturated (viewed during measurement on a scope), but perhaps there are some subtle effects going on.
Attachment 1: MC_Freeswinging.pdf
Attachment 2: IMC_NB_20180409.pdf
13744   Tue Apr 10 14:28:44 2018 gautamUpdateIOOFurther debugging

I am working on IMC electronics. IMC is misaligned until further notice.

13746   Wed Apr 11 01:34:31 2018 gautamUpdateIOOActivities today

[kevin, gautam]

activities done today - details/plots/data/evidence tomorrow.

1. Checked XARM loop shape. Updated NB code to fetch POX data from NDS and undo loop shape rather than using calibration filter bank.
2. Checked POX loop calibration (m/ct). Number I was using was 8e-13. Tonight we measured 9e-13. Updated filter bank.
3. Tried to get Y arm green ALS going.
• Improved GTRY from ~0.05 to 0.3.
• Tried to improve mode matching onto BBPD on PSL table to see a green beat.
• But we were unsuccessful.
• I think I got the near and far field alignment right, and the EY laser temp is set such that I can see an IR beat @~30MHz (so green beat should be at 60 MHz).
• But I couldn't see anything with scope or with HP spec analyzer.
• More tomorrow. Motivation to get green ALS working is to get some more confidence that the excess noise is indeed on the PSL light.
13749   Thu Apr 12 18:12:49 2018 gautamUpdateALSNPRO channels hijacked

## Summary:

1. Today, the measured IR ALS noise for the X arm was dramatically improved. The main change was that I improved the alignment of the PSL pickoff beam into its fiber coupler.
2. The noise level was non-stationary, leading me to suspect power modulation of the RF beat amplitude.
3. I am now measuring the stability of the power in the two polarizations coming from EX table to the PSL table, using the PSL diagnostic connector channels.
4. The EX beam is S-polarized when it is coupled into the fiber. The PSL beam is P-polarized. However, it looks like I have coupled light along orthogonal axes into the fiber, such that when the EX light gets to the PSL table, most of it is in the P-polarization, as judged by my PER measurement setup (i.e. the alignment keys at the PSL table and at the EX table are orthogonal). So it still seems like there is something to be gained by trying to improve the PER a bit more.

## Details:

Today, I decided to check the power coupled into the PSL fiber for the BeatMouth. Surprisingly, it was only 200uW, while I had ~3.15mW going into it in January. Presumably some alignment drifting happened. So I re-aligned the beam into the fiber using the steering mirror immediately before the fiber coupler. I managed to get ~2.9mW in without much effort, and I figured this is sufficient for a first pass, so I didn't try too much more. I then tried making an ALS beat spectrum measurement (arm locked to IMC length using POX, green following the arm using end PDH servo). Surprisingly, the noise performannce was almost as good as the reference! See Attachment #1, in which the red curve is an IR beat (while all others are green beats). The Y arm green beat performance isn't stellar, but one problem at a time. Moreover, the kind of coherence structure between the arm error signal and the ALS beat signal that I reported here was totally absent today.

Upon further investigation, I found that the noise level was actually breathing quite significantly on timescales of minutes. While I was able to successfully keep the TEM00 mode of the PSL beam resonant inside the arm cavity by using the ALS beat frequency as an error signal and MC2 as a frequency actuator, the DC stability was very poor and TRX was wandering around by 50%. So my new hypothesis is that the excess ALS noise is because of one or more of

• Beam jitter at coupling point into fiber.
• Polarization drift of the IR beams.

While I did some work in trying to align the PSL IR pickoff into the fiber along the fast (P-pol) axis, I haven't done anything for the X end pickoff beam. So perhaps the fluctuations in the EX IR power is causing beatnote amplitude fluctuations. In the delay line + phase tracker frequency discriminator, I think RF beatnote amplitude fluctuations can couple into phase noise linearly. For such an apparently important noise source, I can't remeber ever including it in any of the ALS noise budgets.

Before Ph237 today, I decided to use my polarization monitoring setup and check the "RIN" of power in the two polarizations coming out of the fiber on the PSL table. For this purpose, I decided to hijack the Acromag channels used for the PSL diagnostics connector Attachment #2 shows that there is fluctuations at the level of ~10% in the p-polarization. This is the "desired" polarization in that I aligned the PSL beam into the fiber to maximize the power in this polarization. So assuming the power fluctuations in the PSL beam are negligible, this translates to sqrt(10) ~3% fluctuation in the RF beat amplitude. This is at best a conservative estimate, as in reality, there is probably more AM because of the non PM fibers inside the beatmouth.

All of this still doesn't explain the coherence between the measured ALS noise and the arm error signal at 100s of Hz (which presumably can only happen via frequency noise in the PSL).

Another "mystery" - yesterday, while I was working on recovering the Y arm green beat signal on the PSL table, I eventually got a beat signal that was ~20mVpp into 50ohms, which is approximately the same as what I measured when the Y arm ALS performance was "nominal", more than a year ago. But while viewing the Y arm beats (green and IR) simultaneously on an o'scope, I wasn't able to keep both signals synchronised while triggering on one (even though the IR beat frequency was half the green beat frequency). This means there is a huge amount of relative phase noise between the green and IR beats. What (if anything) does this mean? The differential noise between these two beats should be (i) phase noise at the fiber coupler/ inside the fiber itself, and (ii) scatter noise in the green light transmitted through the cavity. Is it "expected" that the relative phase noise between these two signals is so large that we can't view both of them on a common trigger signal on an o'scope? Also - the green mode-matching into the Y arm is abysmal.

Anyways - I'm going to try and tweak the PER and mode-matching into the X end fiber a little and monitor the polarization stability (nothing too invasive for now, eventually, I want to install the new fiber couplers I acquired but for now I'll only change alignment into and rotation of the fiber coupler on the EX table). It would also be interesting to compare my "optimized" PSL drift to the unoptimized EX power drift. So the PSL diagnostic channels will not show any actual PSL diagnostic information until I plug it back in. But I suspect that the EPICS record names and physical channel wiring are wrong anyways - I hooked up my two photodiode signals into what I would believe is the "Diode 1 Power" and "Laser crystal temperature" monitors (as per the schematic), but the signals actually show up for me in "Diode 2 Power" (p-pol) and "Didoe 1 Temperature" (s-pol).

Annoyingly, there is no wiring diagram - on my todo list i guess...

@Steve - could you please take a photo of the EX table and update the wiki? I think the photo we have is a bit dated, the fiber coupler and transmon PDs aren't in it...

Attachment 1: IR_ALS_20180412.pdf
Attachment 2: BeatMouthDrift.png
Attachment 3: ETMX_20180416.jpg
13751   Fri Apr 13 11:02:41 2018 gautamUpdateALSEX fiber polarization drift

Attachment #1 shows the drift of the polarization content of the light from EX entering the BeatMouth. Seems rather large (~10%). I'm going to tweak the X end fiber coupling setup a bit to see if this can be improved. This performance is also a good benchmark to compare the PSL IR light polarization drift. I am going to ask Steve to order Thorlabs K6XS, which has a locking screw for the rotational DoF. With this feature, and by installing some HWPs at the input coupling point, we can ensure that we are coupling light into one of the special axes in a much more deterministic way.

Attachment 1: EX_pol_drift.png
13752   Fri Apr 13 16:59:12 2018 gautamUpdateALSEX green mode-matching

THIS CALCULATION IS WRONG FOR THE OVERCOUPLED CAV.

Summary:

Mode-matching efficiency of EX green light into the arm cavity is ~70*%, as measured using the visibility.

Details:

I wanted to get an estimate for the mode-matching of the EX green beam into the arm cavity. I did the following:

1. Locked arm cavities to IR. Ran dither alignment servos to maximize the transmission of IR on both arms. The X arm dither alignment servo needs some touching up, I can achieve higher TRX by hand than by running the dither.
2. Aligned green PZT mirrors so as to maximize GTRX. Achieved level as 0.47.
3. Went to EX table and tweaked the two available mode-matching lens positions on their translational stages. Saw a quadratic maximum of GTRX about some equilibrium position (where the lenses are now).
4. Measured average value of the green PDH reflection DC level whiel green TEM00 mode was locked. $P_{\mathrm{locked}} = 716 \mathrm{cts}$.
5. Misaligned ITMX macroscopically. Measured the average value of the green PDH reflection DC level again. P_{\mathrm{misaligned}} = 3800 \mathrm{cts}.
6. Closed EX Green shutter. Measured the average value of the green PDH reflection DC level. $P_{\mathrm{dark}} = 30 \mathrm{cts}$.
7. Modulation depth of the EX PDH was determined to be 90mrad. Based on this, power in sideband is negligible compared to power in the carrier, so I didn't bother correcting for sideband power in reflection.
8. Mode-matching efficiency calculated as \frac{P_{\mathrm{misaligned}} - P_{\mathrm{locked}}}{P_{\mathrm{misaligned}} + P_{\mathrm{locked}} - 2P_{\mathrm{dark}} }.

This amount of mode-matching is rather disappointing - using a la mode, the calculated mode-matching efficiency is nearly 100%, but 70% is a far cry from this. The fact that I can't improve this number by either tweaking the steering or by moving the MM lenses around suggests that the estimate of the target arm mode is probably incorrect (the non-gaussianity of the input beam itself is not quantified yet, but I don't believe this input beam can account for 30% mismatch). For the Y-arm, the green REFL DC level is actually higher when locked than when ITMY is misaligned. WTF?? Only explanation I can think of is that the PD is saturated when green is unlocked - but why does the ADC saturate at ~3000cts and not 32000?

This data is almost certainly bogus as the AA box at 1X9 is powered by +/-5VDC and not +/-15VDC. I didn't check but I believe the situation is the same at the Y-end.

3000 cts is ~1V into the ADC. I am going to change the supply voltage to this box (which also reads in ETMX OSEMS) to +/-15V so that we can use the full range of the ADC.

gautam Apr 26 630pm: I re-did the measurement by directly monitoring the REFLDC on a scope, and the situation is not much better. I calculate a MM of 70% into the arm. This is sensitive to the lens positions - while I was working on the EX fiber coupling, I had bumped the lens mounted on a translational stage on the EX table lightly, and I had to move that lens around today in order to recover the GTRX level of 0.5 that I am used to seeing (with arm aligned to maximize IR transmission). So there is definitely room for optimization here.

13753   Fri Apr 13 17:56:26 2018 gautamUpdateALSFibers switched out

I swapped the EX fiber for the PSL fiber in the polarization monitoring setup. There is a lot more power in this fiber, and one of the PDs was saturated. I should really have put a PBS to cut the power, but I opted for putting an absorptive ND1.0 filter on the PD instead for this test. I want to monitor the stability in this beam and compare it to the EX beam's polarization wandering.

13754   Sat Apr 14 14:42:09 2018 gautamUpdateALSFibers switched out

It looks like the drift in polarization content in the PSL pickoff is actually much higher than that in the EX pickoff. Note that to prevent the P-pol diode from saturating, I put an ND filter in front of the PD, so the Y axis actually has to be multiplied by 10 to compare power in S and P polarizations. If this drift is because of the input (linear) polarization being poorly matched to one of the fiber's special axes, then we can improve the situation relatively easily. But if the polarization drift is happening as a result of time-varying stress (due to temp. fluctuations, acoustics etc) on the (PM) fiber from the PSL fiber coupler to the BeatMouth, then I think this is a much more challenging problem to solve.

I'll attempt to quantify the contribution (in Hz/rtHz) of beat amplitude RIN to phase tracker output noise, which will tell us how much of a problem this really is and in which frequency bands. In particular, I'm interested in seeing if the excess noise around 100 Hz is because of beat amplitude fluctuations. But on the evidence thus far, I've seen the beat amplitude drift by ~15 dB (over long timescales) on the control room network analyzer, and this drift seems to be dominated by PSL light amplitude fluctuations.

Attachment 1: PSLdrift.png
13757   Tue Apr 17 14:08:29 2018 gautamUpdateALSFibers switched out

A follow-up on the discussion from today's lunch meeting - Rana pointed out that rotation of the fiber in the mount by ~5degrees cannot account for such large power fluctuations. Here is a 3 day trend from my polarization monitoring setup. Assuming the output fiber coupler rotates in its mount by 5 degrees, and assuming the input light is aligned to one of the fiber's special axes, then we expect <1% fluctuation in the power. But the attached trend shows much more drastic variations, more like 25% in the p-polarization (which is what I assume we use for the beat, since the majority of light is in this polarization, both for PSL and EX). I want to say that the periodicity in the power fluctuations is ~12hours, and so this fluctuation is somehow being modulated by the lab temperature, but unfortunately, we don't have the PSL enclosure temperature logged in order to compare coherence.

Steve: your  plots look like temperature driven

The "beat length" of the fiber is quoted as <=2.7mm. This means that a linearly polarized beam that is not oriented along one of the special axes of the fiber will be rotated through 180 degrees over 2.7mm of propagation through the fiber. I can't find a number for the coefficient of thermal expansion of the fiber, but if temperature driven fluctuations are changing the length of the fiber by 300um, it would account for ~12% power fluctuation between the two polarizations in the monitoring setup, which is in the ballpark we are seeing...

Attachment 1: PSL_fluctuations.png
13758   Wed Apr 18 10:44:45 2018 gautamUpdateCDSslow machine bootfest

All slow machines (except c1auxex) were dead today, so I had to key them all. While I was at it, I also decided to update MC autolocker screen. Kira pointed out that I needed to change the EPCIS input type (in the RTCDS model) to a "binary input", as opposed to an "analog input", which I did. Model recompilation and restart went smooth. I had to go into the epics record manually to change the two choices to "ENABLE" and "DISABLE" as opposed to the default "ON" and "OFF". Anyways, long story short, MC autolocker controls are a bit more intuitive now I think.

Attachment 1: MCautolocker_MEDM_revamp.png
13762   Wed Apr 18 19:02:15 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMC spot centering scripts

I'm working on fixing these (and the associated MEDM scripts) up so that we can get some reliable readback on how well centered the spots are on the MC mirrors. Seems like a bunch of MEDM display paths were broken, and it looks like the optimal demod phases (to put most of the output in I quadrature) are not what the current iteration of the scripts set them to be. It may well be that the gains that convert demodulated counts to mm of spot offset are also not correct anymore. I ran the script ~4times in ~1 hour time span, and got wildly different answers for the spot centering each time, so I wouldn't trust any of those numbers atm...

As you can see in Attachment #1, I stepped the demod phase of one of the servos from -180 to 180 degrees in 5degree increments. The previously used value of 57degrees is actually close to the worst possible point (if you want the signal in the I quadrature, which is what the scripts assume).

I used Attachment #2 to change up the demod phases to maximize the I signal. I chose the demod phase such that it preserved the sign of the demodulated signal (relative to the old demod phases). I also made some StripTool templates for these, and they are in the MC directory. Doing the spot centering measurement with the updated demod phases yields the following output from the script:

spot positions in mm (MC1,2,3 pit MC1,2,3 yaw): [0.72506586251144134, 7.1956908534034403, 0.54754354165324848, -0.94113388241389784, -3.5325883025464959, -2.4934027726657142]

Seems totally unbelievable still that we are so far off center on MC1 yaw. Perhaps the gains and calibration to convert from counts to mm of spot offset need to be rechecked.

Attachment 1: MCass_demodPhase.png
Attachment 2: MCass_demodPhases.png
13765   Thu Apr 19 00:03:51 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMore IMC NBing

Summary:

As shown in the Attachments, it seems like IMC DAC and coil driver noise is the dominant noise source above 30Hz. If we assume the region around the bounce peak is real motion of the stack (to be confirmed with accelerometer data soon), this NB is starting to add up. Much checking to be done, and I'd also like to get a cleaner measurement of coil driver and DAC noise for all 3 optics, as there seems to be a factor of ~5 disagreement between the MC3 coil driver noise measurement and my previous foray into this subject. The measurement needs to be refined a little, but I think the conclusion holds.

Details:

1. I had a measurement of the MC3 coil driver noise from ~2weeks ago when I was last working on this that I had not yet added to the NB.
2. Today I added it. To convert from measured voltage noise to frequency noise, I assumed the usual 0.016N/A per coil number, which is probably a large source of systematic error.
3. I define the "nominal" IMC operating condition as MC1 and MC3 having the analog de-whitening filters switched on, but MC2 switched off.
4. So length noise should be dominated by coil driver noise on MC1 and MC3, and DAC noise on MC2.
5. The measurement I had was made with the input to the coil driver board terminated in 50ohms. Measurement was made in-situ. The measurement has a whole bunch of 60Hz harmonics (despite the Prologix box being powered by a linear power adapter, but perhaps there are other ground loops which are coupling into the measurement). So I'd like to get a cleaner measurement tmrw.
6. To confirm, Koji suggested some On/Off test by driving some broadband noise in the coils. I figured toggling the analog de-whitening, such that the DAC noise or coil driver electronics dominate is an equally good test.
7. Attachment #2 shows the effect in arm error and control signal spectra. Note that I engaged analog de-whitening on all 3 optics for the red curves in this plot. But even leaving MC2 de-whitening off, I could see the read curve was below the black reference trace, which was taken with de-whitening off on all 3 optics.

Remarks:

Since I sunk some time into it already, the motivation behind this work is just to try and make the IMC noise budget add up. It is not directly related to lowering the IR ALS noise, but if it is true that we are dominated by coil driver noise, we may want to consider modifying the MC coil driver electronics along with the ITM and ETMs.

Attachment 1: IMC_NB_20180409.pdf
Attachment 2: IMC_coils_20180418.pdf
13766   Thu Apr 19 01:04:00 2018 gautamConfigurationGeneralAS port laser injection

For the arm cavity ringdowns, I guess we don't need AS55/AS110 (although I think the camera will still be useful for alignment). But for something like RC Gouy phase characterization, I'd imagine we need the AS detectors to lock various cavities. So I think we should go for a solution that doesn't disturb the AS PD beams.

It's hard to tell from the plot in the manual (pg 52) what exactly the relaxation oscillation frequency is, but I think it's closer to 600 kHz (is this characteristic of NdYAG NPROs)??  Is the high RIN on the light straight out of the NPRO?

 Quote: We could use a simple mirror if we don't need AS110 and AS55, we could use a polarizing BS and work with s polarization, or we find a Faraday Isolator. There is a strong oscillation around 210 kHz. The oscillation frequency decreases when the output power is turned down, the noise eater has no effect.
13767   Thu Apr 19 09:57:03 2018 gautamUpdateWikiAP and ETMX tables uploaded to wiki

The most up to date pictures of the AP table and ETMX table that Steve took have been uploaded to the relevant page on the wiki. It seems like the wiki doesn't display previews of jpg images - by using png, I was able to get the thumbnail of the attachment to show up. It would be nice to add beam paths to these two images. The older versions of these photos were moved to the archive section on the same page.

13770   Thu Apr 19 17:15:35 2018 gautamUpdateIOOMore IMC NBing

Summary:

Today, I repeated the coil driver noise measurement. Now, the coil driver noise curve in the noise budget plot (Attachment #1) is the actual measurement of all 12 coils (made with G=100 SR560). I am also attaching the raw voltage noise measurement (input terminated in 50ohms, Attachment #2). Note that POX11 spectrum has now been re-measured with analog de-whitening engaged on all 3 optics such that the DAC noise contribution should be negligible compared to coil driver noise in this configuration. The rows in Attachment #2 correspond to 800 Hz span (top) and full span (bottom) on the FFT analyzer.

Details:

The main difference between this measurement, and the one I did middle of last year (which agreed with the expectation from LISO modeling quite well) is that this measurement was done in-situ inside the eurocrate box while last year, I did everything on the electronics benches. So I claim that the whole mess of harmonics seen in the raw measurements are because of some electronics pickup near 1X6. But even disregarding the peaky features, the floor of ~30nV/rtHz is ~6x than what one would expect from LISO modeling (~5nV/rtHz). I confirmed by looking that the series resistance for all 3 MC optics is 430ohms. I also did the measurement with the nominal bias voltages applied to the four channels (these come in via the slow ADCs). But these paths are low-passed by an 8th order low pass with corner @ 1Hz, so at 100 Hz, even 1uV/rtHz should be totally insignificant. I suppose I could measure (with EPICS sine waves) this low-pass filtering, but it's hard to imagine this being the problem. At the very least, I think we should get rid of the x3 gain on the MC2 coil driver de-whitening board (and also on MC1 and MC3 if they also have the x3 factor).

Attachment 1: IMC_NB_20180419.pdf
Attachment 2: IMC_coilDriverNoises_20180419.pdf
13773   Fri Apr 20 00:26:34 2018 gautamUpdateALSFibers switched out

Summary:

I think the dominant cause for the fact that we were seeing huge swing in the power coupled into the fiber was that the beam being sent in was in fact not linearly polarized, but elliptically polarized. I've rectified this with the help of a PBS. Fiber has been plugged into my polarization monitoring setup. Let's monitor for some long stretch and see if the situation has improved.

Details:

• The new fiber mount I ordered, K6XS, arrived today. I like it - it has little keys with which all DoFs can be locked. Moreover, it is compatible with the fixed collimators which IMO is the easiest way to achieve good mode-matching into the fiber. It is basically a plug-and-play replacement for the mounts we were using. Anyways, we can evaluate the performance over the coming days.
• I installed it on the PSL table (started work ~10pm, HEPA turned up to maximum, PSL shutter closed).
• But even with the new rotational DoF locking feature, I saw that slight disturbances in the fiber caused wild fluctuations in my polarization monitoring setup PD outputs. This was a useful tool through the night of checking the polarization content in the two special axes - Aidan had suggested using a heat gun but shaking the fiber a bit works well too I think.
• The PM980 fiber has an alignment key that is aligned with the slow axis of the fiber - so it is a useful alignment reference. But even by perturbing the roational alignment about the vertical by +/-15 degrees, I saw no improvement in this behavior. So I began to question my assumption that the input beam itself had clean polarization content.
• Since my pickoff beam has gone through a QWP and two PBSs, I had assumed that the beam was linearly polarized.
• But by putting a PBS just upstream of the input fiber coupler, I could see a beam at the S-port with an IR card (while I expected the beam to be P-polarized).
• OK - so I decided to clean up the input polarization by leaving this PBS installed. With this modification to the setup, I found that me shaking the fiber around on the PSL table didn't affect the output polarization content nearly as dramatically as before!!
• The state I am leaving it in tonight is such that there is ~100x the power in the P-polarization output monitor as the S-polarization (PER ~ 20dB). I didn't try and optimize this too much more for now, I want to observe some long term trend to see if the wild power fluctuations have been mitigated.
• The output coupler is mounted on the inferior K6X mount, and so there is the possibility that some drift will be attributable to rotation of the output coupler in it's mount. Thermally driven length changes / time varying stresses in the fiber may also lead to some residual power fluctuations. But I don't expect this to be anywhere near the ~25% I reported in the previous elog.
• The rejected beam from the PBS was measured to be ~300 uW. I haven't dumped this properly, to be done tomorrow.
• HEPA turned back down to 30%, PSL enclosure closed up, PSL shutter re-opened ~0030am.
• Note that the EX and EY fiber coupled beams are also likely subject to the same problem. We have to double check. I think it's better to have a PBS in front of the input fiber coupler as this also gives us control over the amount of light coupled into the fiber.

Power budget:

Power in Measured power (Ophir, filter OFF)
@Input coupler, before PBS 4.4 mW
P-pol content @ input coupler 4.06 mW
S-pol (rejected) from PBS 275 uW
@Output coupler 2.6 mW (MM ~65%)

13775   Fri Apr 20 16:22:32 2018 gautamUpdateGeneralNodus hard-rebooted

Aidan called saying nodus was down at ~345pm. I was able to access it at ~330pm. I couldn't ssh in from my machine or the control room ones. So I went to 1X7 and plugged in a monitor to nodus. It was totally unresponsive. Since the machine wasn't responding to ping either, I decided to hard-reboot it. Machine seemed to come back up smoothly. I had trouble getting the elog started - it wasn't clear to me that the web ports were closed by default, so even though the startELOGD.sh script was running fine, the 8080 port wasn't open to the outside world. Anyways, once I figured this out, I was able to start the elog. DokuWiki also seems to be up and running now...

13778   Sat Apr 21 20:19:05 2018 gautamUpdateGeneralMegatron hard-rebooted

I found megatron in a similar state to that which nodus was in yesterday. Clued by the fact that MCautolocker wasn't executing the mc scripts (as was evident from looking at the wall StripTool trace), I tried ssh-ing into megatron, but was unable to (despite it being responsive to ping requests). So I went into the VEA and plugged in a monitor to megatron - saw nothing on it. With no soft reboot options available, I power cycled the machine via the front panel button. It came back up smoothly. I manually restarted the autolocker, FSSslow and EX thermal control processes (the former two with initctl, while the latter runs in a tmux session). Everything seems alright for now. Not sure how long megatron has been dead for.

13779   Sat Apr 21 20:25:12 2018 gautamUpdateALSPSL fiber pickoff status

Seems like there is still a bit of variation in the power in the two polarizations, though it is much smaller now, at the ~5% level (see Attachment #1). Since the pattern is repeating itself over the day timescale, I think this effect is not because of rotation of the output coupler in the mount, but is in fact a temperature driven waveplate effect because of imperfect alignment at the input coupler (which itself is locked down). I'm going to rotate the input coupler by 5 degrees (old = 110 degrees, new=115degrees) to see if the situation improves...

gautam Apr 24 2pm: Steve suggested confirming the correlation by hooking up the PSL table temperature sensor. This used to be logged but since the c1psl ADC card failure, has not been recorded. Assuming the sensor and preamp still work fine, we can use the PSL diagnostic Acromag (whose channels I have hijacked to monitor polarization stability already) to at least temporarily monitor the temperature inside the PSL enclosure. I am in need of a DB25 breakout board for this purpose which I am missing right now, as soon as I obtain one, I'll hook this up...

Attachment 1: PSL-beatMouthPickoff.png
13783   Tue Apr 24 10:10:43 2018 gautamUpdateComputer Scripts / ProgramsParticle swarm hyper parameter optimization

I'm copying and pasting Nikhil's email here as he was unable to login to the elog (but should now be able to in order to reply to any comments, and add more details about this test, motivation, methodology etc).

I did some post-processing after running the grid search. The following steps were carried out:

1) Selected those sets whose cost fun were less than a specific threshold (here 10000)

2) Next task was to see if the parameters of these good solutions had some pattern

3) I used a dimensionality reduction technique called t-SNE to project the 6 dimensional parameter space to 2 dim (for better visualization )

4) Made a scatter plot of these (see fig )

5) Used K-Means to find the clusters in this data

6) MarkerSize & Color reflect the cost fun. Bigger the marker size means better the solution.

7) Visual inspection implied cluster 5 had the best ranking points & more than any other cluster

8) These points had the following Parameter set: Workers {20,40}, SwarmSize {500}, MaxIter {500}, Self Adjustment {1}, Social Adjustment {1}, Tolerance {1e-3,1e-8}

     See fig: for the box plot

9) It looks like is a particular set of values rather than individual values that gives the best results.

Attachment 1: ClusterFminScaled.png
Attachment 2: ClusterID_5.png
13784   Tue Apr 24 11:31:59 2018 gautamConfigurationALSProposed changes to EX fiber coupling

Motivation: I want to make another measurement of the out-of-loop ALS beat noise, with improved MM into both the PSL and EX fibers and also better polarization control. For this, I want to make a few changes at the EX table.

1. Replace existing fiber collimator with one of the recently acquired F220-APC-1064 collimators.
• This gives an output mode of diameter 2.4mm with a beam divergence angle of 0.032 degrees (all numbers theoretical - I will measure these eventually but we need a beam path of ~5m length in order to get a good measurement of this collimated beam).
• I believe it will be easier to achieve good mode matching into this mode rather than with the existing collimator.
• Unfortunately, the mount is still going to be K6X and not K6XS.
2. Improve mode-matching into fiber.
• I used my measurement of the Innolight NPRO mode from 2016, a list of available lenses, and some measured distances to calculate a solution that gives theoretical 100% overlap with the collimator mode, that has beam diameter 2.4mm, located 80cm from the NPRO shutter head location (see Attachment #1).
• The required movement of components is schematically illustrated in Attachment #2.
• One of the required lens positions is close to the bracket holding the enclosure to the table, but I think the solution is still workable (the table is pretty crowded so I didn't bother too much with trying to find alternative solutions as all of them are likely to require optics placed close to existing ones and I'd like to avoid messing with the main green beam paths.
• I will attempt to implement this and see how much mode matching we actually end up getting.
3. Install a PBS + HWP combo in the EX fiber coupling path.
• This is for better polarization control.
• Also gives us more control over how much light is coupled into the fiber in a better way than with the ND filters in current path.
4. Clean EX fiber tip.
5. Dump a leakage IR beam from the harmonic separator post doubling oven, which is currently just hitting the enclosure. It looks pretty low power but I didn't measure it.
6. Re-install EX power monitoring PD.

Barring objections, I will start working on these changes later today.

Attachment 1: EX_fiber_MM.pdf
Attachment 2: EX_fiber_changes.png
13786   Tue Apr 24 18:54:15 2018 gautamConfigurationALSProposed changes to EX fiber coupling

I started working on the EX table. Work is ongoing so I will finish this up later in the evening, but in case anyone is wondering why there is no green light...

1. EX laser shutter was closed.
2. Disconnected EX input to the beat mouth at the PSL table in order to avoid accidentally frying the PDs.
3. Prepared new optomechanics hardware
• To my surprise, I found a bubble-wrapped K6XS mount (the one with locking screws for all DoFs) on the SP table. No idea where this came from or who brought it here, or how long it has been here, but I decided to use it nevertheless.
• Prepared f = 200mm and f = -200mm lenses on traveling mounts (Thorlabs DT12, lenses are also Thorlabs, AR1064).
• Made a slight translation of the beam path towards the north to facilitate going through the center of the mounted lenses.
• Temporarily removed a beam dump from next to the final steering mirror before the Green REFL PD, and also removed one of the brackets between the enclosure and the table for ease of laying out components. These will be replaced later.
4. Installed this hardware on the PSL table, roughly aligned beam path.
• Beam now goes through the center of all lenses and is hitting the collimator roughly in the center.

To do in the eve:

1. Clean fiber and connect it to the collimator.
2. Optimize mode-matching as best as possible.
3. Attenuate power using PBS and HWP so as to not damage the BeatMouth PD (Pthresh = 2mW). These are also required to make the polarizations of the EX coupled light (S-pol) and PSL (P-pol) go along the same axis of the PM fiber.
4. Re-install temporarily removed beam dump and bracket on EX table.
5. Re-install EX power monitoring PD.
6. Measure beat frequency spectrum.
 Quote: Motivation: I want to make another measurement of the out-of-loop ALS beat noise, with improved MM into both the PSL and EX fibers and also better polarization control. For this, I want to make a few changes at the EX table.  Barring objections, I will start working on these changes later today.

gautam 1245am: Fiber cleaning was done - I'll upload pics tomorrow, but it seems like the fiber was in need of a good cleaning. I did some initial mode-matching attempts, but peaked at 10% MM. Koji suggested not going for the final precisely tunable lens mounting solution while trying to perfect the MM. So I'll use easier to move mounts for the initial tuning and then swap out the DT12s once I have achieved good MM. Note that without any attenuation optics in place, 24.81mW of power is incident on the collimator. In order to facilitate easy debugging, I have connected the spare fiber from PSL to EX at the PSL table to the main EX fiber - this allows me to continuously monitor the power coupled into the fiber at the EX table while I tweak lens positions and alignment. After a bit of struggle, I noticed I had neglected a f=150mm lens in my earlier calculation - I've now included it again, and happily, there seems to be a solution which yields the theoretical 100% MM efficiency. I'll work on implementing this tomorrow..

13789   Wed Apr 25 19:09:37 2018 gautamConfigurationALSNew look EX Fiber coupling

Summary:

I implemented most of the things outlined in my previous elog. Implementing the a la mode solution after including all lenses, I managed to achieve >90% mode-matching into the fiber. Power monitor PD has not been re-installed yet, neither has the bracket I removed. The polarization monitoring setup on the PSL table has now been hooked up to the EX fiber, let's see how it does overnight. All quoted power measurements in this elog were made with the Ophir power meter (filter off).

Details:

Attachment #1 shows the implemented MM solution. I did not include the PBS substrate in the calculation, maybe that will help a little.

Attachment #2 shows the new layout. The beam is a little low on the PBS and HWP - I will swap these out to mounts with slightly lower height, that should improve the situation a little. There is no evidence of clipping, and the beam clears all edges by at least 3 beam diameters.

Attachments #3 and #4 show the EX fiber before and after cleaning respectively. Seems like the cleaning was successful.

Attachment #5 shows the beam incident on the coupler with on an IR card. This beam only goes through a QWP, lens, BS and 45 degree steering mirror, so I'm not sure what's responsible for the large halo around the main beam. There is significant power in the halo too - I measured 25mW right before the coupler, but if I use an iris to try and cut off the halo, the power is measured to be ~19mW.

Alignment Procedure:

• Connect spare fiber such that I can monitor coupled power (minus fiber losses and joint loss) at EX table.
• Use Fluke fault analyzer to align input and collimator modes coarsely.
• Monitored coupled power continuously using Fiber Power Meter (although MM calculations were made with Ophir, this was more convenient for "Live" viewing).
• Tweaked one available steering mirror and K6XS axes to maximize coupled power.
• Tweaked lens positions slightly to see if significant improvement could be made.
• After optimizing, I measured 17.1mW coming out of the EX fiber at the PSL table. As mentioned earlier, the input power is tricky to measure given the large amount of junk light around the main mode. But I measured 18.6 mW after the iris. So this is ~95%. In any case, safe to say that we are waaaay better than the previous situation of 380uW out of 1.9mW.
• Added PBS and HWP to cut the incident power to 1.6mW. I measured 1.2mW on the PSL table. Probably adding the PBS screwed up the MM a bit, to be tweaked tomorrow.
• I had moved the Green shutter a bit during this work - as a result, the Green REFL was not making it back to the REFL PD. I remedied this, and EX Green TEM00 mode was locked to the arm. GTRX of ~0.4 was recovered, which is around the number I'm used to seeing.
Attachment 1: EX_fiber_MM.pdf
Attachment 2: IMG_6977.JPG
Attachment 3: IMG_6972.JPG
Attachment 4: IMG_6974.JPG
Attachment 5: IMG_6976.JPG
13791   Thu Apr 26 11:24:50 2018 gautamConfigurationALSNew look EX Fiber coupling - pol stability

Here is a first look at the overnight stability. For the temperature, I used the calibration I found in the old psl database file, seems to give sensible results. It's only 15 hours of data plotted, so we don't see the full 24 hour temperature swing, but I think it is safe to say that for the EX fiber, the dominant cause of the "waveplate effect" is not in fact temperature drift. The polarization extinction is still better than 10dB in the entire period of observation though... I'm going to push ahead with a beat spectrum measurement, though there is room for improvement in the input coupling alignment to fiber special axes.

The apparent increase in these plots towards the end of the 15 hour period is because the lights on the PSL table were switched on.

Annoyingly, it seems like the PSL NPRO channels (which I have hijacked to do this test) do not have minute trend data directly accessible from NDS2. Not sure whether this is an NDS2 problem, or something missing in the way the channels are setup with Acromag. Probably the former, as I am able to generate minute trend plots with dataviewer. I forget whether this is the same as the infamous minute trend problem. Second trend data is available though, and is what I used to make these plots...

Attachment 1: polStab.pdf
13796   Fri Apr 27 01:36:02 2018 gautamConfigurationALSIR ALS noise performance

Summary:

My goal was to do some further characterization of the IR ALS system tonight. With POX as an OOL sensor, I measured an RMS displacement noise of  8 pm with the arm under ALS control. I calculated the CARM linewidth to be 77 Hz (=10.3 pm) for the 40m parameters, assuming 30ppm arm loss. Fuurthermore, this number is 3x better than the 24 pm RMS quoted in the Izumi et. al. paper. Of course I am quoting the best results from my efforts tonight. Conclusions:

1. [Attachment #1] --- With XARM locked using POX, the ALS beat noise (i.e. Phase Tracker output noise) lines up well with the reference we have been using for some time now (and indeed, is better in some places).
2. [Attachment #2] --- With the arm locked on ALS and POX as an OOL sensor, I measured performance comparable to this measurement we did sometime last year. Anomalies in this measurement and the one above were what precipitated the IMC noise investigation.
3. [Attachment #3] --- The above two attachments are not the whole story. During the day, I get significantly worse performance (so much so that I couldn't even do the handoff to ALS control). But in 5 minutes of measurement, the ALS noise seems quite stationary.
4. [Attachment #4] --- This is really the same as Attachment #2, but I wanted to overlay some vlines. Maybe this is a clue to some 60 Hz / ground loop issues, but the RMS has significant contribution from these harmonics. Tmrw, I will add the old measurement overlaid to this plot (and for what its worth, the Izumi et. al. spectrum as well).
5. [Attachment #5] --- With the arm under ALS control, I was able to maintain the lock for a solid hour (and more as I write up this elog). Somehow inkscape screwed up the fonts, but main point here is that TRX is stable to within 10% throughout the observation time.

Since the stability and noise seemed quite good, I decided to collect some arm scan data to give to our modeSpec SURFs to practice fitting (which is the short dip in TRX in Attachment #4). Although after the discussion with Rana today, I think it may be that we want to do this measurement in reflection and not transmission, and look for a zero crossing in the PDH signal. In any case, I was able to scan 7 FSRs without any issues. I will upload the data to some git repo. GPS start time is 1208850775, sweep was 3mins long.

I think the next step here is to noise-budget this curve. At least the DFD noises

Attachment 1: 2018_04_BeatMouth_POX.pdf
Attachment 2: 2018_04_BeatMouth.pdf
Attachment 3: ALSSpecgram.pdf
Attachment 4: ALS_ASD.pdf
Attachment 5: ALSstab.pdf
13797   Fri Apr 27 16:55:31 2018 gautamUpdateGeneralEY area access blocked

Steve was calibrating the load cells at the EY table with the crane - we didn't get through the full procedure today, so the area near the EY table is kind of obstructed. The 100kg donut is resting on the floor on the North side of the EY table and is still connected to the crane. There are stopper plates underneath the donut, and it is still connected to the crane. Steve has placed cones around the area too. The crane has been turned off.

13799   Sun Apr 29 22:53:06 2018 gautamUpdateGeneralDARM actuation estimate

Motivation:

We'd like to know how much actuation is required on the ETMs to lock the DARM degree of freedom. The "disturbance" we are trying to cancel is the seismic driven length fluctuation of the arm cavity. In order to try and estimate what the actuation required will be, we can use data from POX/POY locks. I'd collected some data on Friday which I looked at today. Here are the results.

Method:

• I collected the error and control signals for both arm cavities while they were locked to the PSL.
• Knowing the POX/POY sensing response and the actuator transfer functions, we can back out the free running displacements of the two arm cavities.
• I used numbers from the cal filters which may not be accurate (although POX sensing response which was recently measured).
• But the spectra computed using this method seem reasonable, and the X and Y arm asds line up around 1 Hz (albeit on a log scale).
• In this context, $L_X$ is really a proxy for $|f_X - f_{MC}|$ and similarly for L_Y so I think the algebra works out correctly.
• I didn't include any of the violin mode/AA/AI filters in this calculation.
• Having calculated the arm cavity displacements, I computed "DARM" as L_y- L_x and then plotted its asd.
• For good measure, I also added the quadrature sum of 4 optics' displacement noise as per the 40m GWINC model - there seems to be a pretty large discrepancy, not sure why.

If this approach looks legit, I will compute the control signal that is required to stabilize this level of disturbance using the DARM control loop, and see what is the maximum permissible series resistance we can use in order to realize this stabilization. We can then compare various scenarios like different whitening schemes, with/without Barry puck etc, and look at coil driver noise levels for each of them.

Attachment 1: darmEst.pdf
13805   Tue May 1 19:37:50 2018 gautamUpdateGeneralDARM actuation estimate

Here is an updated plot - the main difference is that I have added a trace that is the frequency domain wiener filter subtraction of the coherent power between the L_X and L_Y time series. I tried reproducing the calculation with the time domain wiener filter subtraction as well, using half of the time series (i.e. 5 mins) to train the wiener filter (with L_X as target and L_Y as witness), but I don't get any subtraction above 5 Hz on the half of the data that is a test data set. Probably I am not doing the pre-filtering correctly - I downsampled the signal to 1 kHz, weighted it by low passing the signal above 40 Hz and trained the Wiener filter on the resulting time series. But this frequency domain Wiener filter subtraction should be at least a lower bound on DARM - indeed, it is slightly lower everywhere than simply taking the time domain subtraction of the two data streams.

To do:

• Re-measure calibration numbers used.
• Redo calculation once the numbers have been verified.

Putting a slightly cleaned up version of this plot in now - I'm only including the coherence-inferred DARM estimate now instead of the straight up time domain subtraction. So this is likely to be an underestimate. At low (<10 Hz) frequencies, the time domain computation lines up fairly well, but I suspect that I am getting huge amounts of spectral leakage (see Attachment #2) in the way I compute the spectrum using scipy's filtering routine (once the Wiener filter has been computed). Note that Attachment #2, I didn't break up the data into a training/testing set as in this case, we just care about the one-off offline performance in order to get an estimate of DARM.

The python version of the wiener filter generating code only supports [b,a] output of the digital filter, an sos filter might give better results. Need to figure out the least painful way of implementing the low-noise digital filtering in python...

Attachment 1: darmEst.pdf
Attachment 2: darmEst_time.pdf
13807   Wed May 2 21:39:33 2018 gautamConfigurationALSIR ALS for EY

The new K6XS mounts I ordered have arrived. I want to install one of them at the Y-end. I can't find a picture of the current layout but it exists as there is a hardcopy affixed to the ETMY chamber door, Steve, can we dig this up and put it in the wiki? In any case, the current beam going into the fiber is the pickoff from the post-SHG harmonic separator. I'd like to change the layout a bit, and use a pickoff before the doubling oven, but looking at the optical table, this seems like a pretty involved task and would probably require large scale optical hardware rearrangement. In any case, the MM of the green beam into the Y-arm is <50%, so I would like to redo that as well. Does anyone know of a measurement of the mode from the Lightwave NPRO that is installed at EY? I think Annalisa is the one who installed this stuff, but I can't find an actual NPRO mode measurement in her elog thread.

Found it: elog4874, elog8436. I updated the laser inventory page to link the lasers in use to the most recent mode measurements I could find on the elog. I guess ideally we should also link the AM/PM response measurements.

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as of 3-31-2016

The oplev path was optimized with AR coated lenses and new He/Ne laser Jan 24, 2017

13811   Thu May 3 12:10:12 2018 gautamConfigurationGeneralAS port laser injection

I think we need AS55 for locking the configuration Jon suggested - AS55 I and Q were used to lock the SRMI previously, and so I'd like to start from those settings but perhaps there is a way to do this with AS110 I and Q as well.

 Quote: What signals are needed for the Guoy phase measurement? Is AS 110 sufficient, or do we need AS55?

13812   Thu May 3 12:19:13 2018 gautamUpdateCDSslow machine bootfest

Reboot for c1susaux and c1iscaux today. ITMX precautions were followed. Reboots went smoothly.

IMC is shuttered while Jon does PLL characterization...

Now relocked.

ELOG V3.1.3-