Tonight I tried to lock the interferometer. At the first attempts the arm power didn't go above about 4. The mode cleaner seemed to be not well aligned and it lost lock or got stuck on a wrong mode. I had to run the MC_UP and MC_DOWN scripts to lock it again.

After that the locking proceed more smoothly; at least till a power level in the arms of about 60. Then again the mode cleaner lost lock and I had to run the scripts again. Without the MCWFS servo off the MC reflected power is still rather high (about 1.7); also even when the WFS servo is engaged the reflected power is about 0.5, versus 0.3 that it should be.

Those are both signs of a not very good alignment. Tomorrow I'll have to work on the injection periscope on the PSL table to try to fix that.

Since lately the alignment of the input beam to the interferometer has changed, I went checking the alignment of the beam on the photodiodea. They were all fine except for pd9, that is AS DD 199. Here the DC is totally null. The beam seems to go right on the diode but the scope on the PD's DC output shows no power. This is really strange and bad.

It's railed.  This is what halted locking progess on Monday night, as this channel is used for the offloadMCF script, which slowly feeds back a CARM signal to the ETMs to prevent the VCO from saturating.

Attached is a 5 day trend, which shows that the channel went dead a few days ago.  All the channels shown are being collected from the same ICS110B (I think), but only some are dead.  It looks like they went dead around the time of the "All computers down" from Sunday.

After inspecting PD9 with the viewer and the cards, the beam looks like it is aligned to the photodiode althought there is no signal at the DC output of the photodetector. So I checked the spectrum for PD9_i and Q (see attachments) and it seems that those channels are actually seeing the beam. I'm going to check the alignemtn again and see the efefct on the spectra to make sure that the beam is really hitting the PD.

 I aligned PD9. Here are the spectra confirming that.

 Attached are the channels being recorded from the ICS110B in 1Y2 (the IOO rack).  Channels 12, 13, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25 appear to have gone dead after the computer problems on Sunday.

 This has been fixed by one of the two most powerful & useful IFO debugging techniques: rebooting.  I keyed the crate in 1Y2.

I found the alignment biases for the PRM and the SRM in a funny state.  It seemed like they had been "saved" in badly misaligned position, so the restore scripts on the IFO configure screen were not working.  I've manually put them into a better alignment.

After the mini boot fest that Jenne did today, I checked whether that fixed the overflow issues we yesterday prevented the alignemnt of the arms. 

I ran the alignment script for the arms getting 0.85 for TRX and 0.75 for TRY: low values.

After I ran the script ,C1SUSVME1 and C1SUSVME2 started having problems with the FE SYNC (counter at 16378). I rebooted those two and fix the sync problem but the transmitted powers didn't improve.

Are we still having problem due to MC misalignment?

See attachments

 I've now also trended the MOPA output power for the last 200 days to check a possible correlation with the FSS reflected power. See attachment.

The trend shows that the laser power has decayed but it seems that the FSS reflected power has done it even faster: 30% drop in the FSS vs 7% for the MOPA in the last 60 days (attachment n.2).

 Here we trended also the PMC and the MZ. The drop in the PMC happens at the same rate as the MOPA's.

That let us think that the FSS transmitteed power has gone down because of the reference cavity progressive misalignment to the laser beam.

We need to adjust that alignment sometime.

The drop in the NPRO output power (upper row, 3rd plot: Ch10 C1:PSL_126MOPA_126MON) accompained an increase of "fuzziness" in PMCTRANSPD and both coincided in time with the day we tempoarirly removed the flap from the laser chiller's chiller (July 14 2009).

Spent a lot of time aligning tonight.  The BS is not staying put--sometimes after a lock loss it gets badly mis-aligned. 

DD handoff is working, after putting beam on REFL diodes and running senseDRM script.

It was fine when I came in earlier today, but I just got back from dinner, and it's not good. I looked in dataviewer, and it seems to have been sliding out for the past couple of hours... Here is a picture:

I swear I am not responsible this time... all I've been doing is working in the control room.

 Mode cleaner bounced back on its own about 2 hours ago.

locking work proceeding apace tonight.

diagonalized DRM with setDDphases & senseDRM. 

initial locks are fairly quick, aqstep script succeeds reliably.

first part of cm_step (handoff CARM-> MCL) usually works.

tuning up later parts of cm_step (presumably due to optical gain changes resulting from MOPA decline). 

got to arm powers ~60.

Tried to lock the interferometer but arm power didn't get over 65.

Tonight, after the weekend, I resumed the work on locking.

When I started the Mode Cleaner was unlocked because the MZ was also unlocked.

I aligned the MZ and the transmitted power reached about 2.5

Initially the interferometer lost lock at arm power of about 3-4. It looked like the alignment wasn't good enough. So I ran the alignment scripts a few times, first the scripts for the single parts and in the end the one for the full IFO.

Then I also locked again the MZ and this time the transmitted power got to about 4.

In the following locking attempts the the arm power reached 65 but then the lock got lost during the handing of CARM to C1:LSC-PD11_I

I'll keep working on that tomorrow night.

While trying to make the OAF work, I found that the XYCOM switches for MC1/3 have been set in the bad way for awhile. This means that the hardware filters were bypassed and that MC1 & MC3 were moving around too much at high frequency and possibly causing trouble with the locking. I have put them back into the default position.

On Friday, Jenne and I were playing around with turning the dewhitening off/on to see if it efffected the OAF stability. At the time, I didn't pay too much attention to what the state was. Looks like it was in the wrong state (hardware bypassed) when we found it. For the OAF work, we generally want it in that bypassed state, but its bad because it makes noise in the interferometer. The bits in question are bits 16-23 on the XYCOM screen.

I have updated the snapshot and set the screen in the appropriate settings. I used a swept sine measurement to verify the filter state. In the attached plot, green corresponds to XYCOM green and red corresponds to red.

It's been a miserable week for lock acquisition, with each night worst than the last.  The nadir was around Sunday night, when I couldn't even get a PRM to lock stably, which meant that the auto-alignment scripts could not finish successfully.  It now appears that was due to some XYCOM mis-settings. 

We've also been having problems with timing for c1susvme2.  Attached is a one-hour plot of timing data for this cpu, known as SRM.  Each spike is an instance of lateness, and a potential cause of lock loss.  This has been going on for a quite a while.

Tonight we also encountered a large peak in the frequency noise around 485 Hz.  Changing the MZ lock point (the spot in the PZT range) solved this.

Good progress in IFO locking tonight, with the arm powers reaching about half the full resonant maximum. 

Still to do is check out some weirdness with the OMC DAC, fix the wireless network, and look at c1susvme2 timing.

Attached is a 3 day trend of SRM CPU timing info.  It clearly gets better (though still problematic) at some point, but I don't know why as it doesn't correspond with any work done.  I've labeled a reboot, which was done to try to clear out the timing issues.  It can also be seen that it gets worse during locking work, but maybe that's a coincidence.

More progress with locking tonight, with initial acquisition and power ramps working.  The final handoff to RF CARM still needs work.

I found the wireless router was unplugged from the network--just plugging in the cable solved the problem.  For some reason that RJ45 connector doesn't actually latch, so the cable is prone to slipping out of the jack.

Late last night after the ETMY settled down from the quake I made some more progress in locking, with the handoff to RF CARM succeeding once.  The final reduction of the CARM offset to zero didn't work, however.

Working well tonight: the handoff of CARM to RF (REFL2I), successful reduction of CARM offset to zero, and transition control of MCL path to the OUT1 from the common mode board.  All that's left in lock acquisition is to try and get the common mode bandwidth up and the boost on.

Lock acquisition working well tonight.  Was able to engage CM boost (not superboost) with bandwidth of ~10kHz.  Also succeeded once in handing off DARM to DC readout.

Last night, 2+ hour lock, probably broken by me driving too hard (DARM_EXC).

The IFO can now be locked during the daytime.  Well, it's locked now.

This is huge.    Five hours of lock only interrupted by intentional break from transfer function abuse.

Awesome 5 hrs of locking  Rob!

Lock acquisition has gone bad tonight. 

The initial stage works fine, up through handing off control of CARM to MCL.  However, when increasing the AO path (analog gain), there are large DC shifts in the C1:IOO-MC_F signal.  Eventually this causes the pockels cell in the FSS loop to saturate, and lock is lost. 

 This problem has disappeared.  I don't know what it was. 

The first plot shows one of the symptoms.  The second plot is a similar section taken from a more normal acquisition sequence the night before.

All is not perfect, however, as now the handoff to RF CARM is not working.

LockAcq is back on track, with the full script working well.  Measurements in progress.

The problem has returned.  I still don't know what it is, but it's making me angry. 

I never actually figured out exactly what was wrong in entry 2162, but I managed to circumvent by changing the time sequence of events in the up script, moving the big gain increases in the common mode servo to the end of the script.  So the IFO can be locked again.

This afternoon, I tried to lock the interferometer again after a few days.

After a couple of failed attempts, and relocks of the MZ, the interferometer stayed locked continuously for about 50 minutes, with arm power of about 92.

I just wanted to check the status of the interferometer so I didn't do any particular measurement in the meantime.

Locking has gone sour.  The CARM to MCL handoff, which is fairly early in the full procedure and usally robust, is failing reliably. 

As soon as the SUS-MC2_MCL gain is reduced, lock is broken.  There appears to be an instability around 10Hz.  Not sure if it's related.

 Five day minute trend.  FAST_F doesn't appear to have gone crazy.

 Whatever the locking problem was, the power of magical thinking has forced it to retreat for now.  The IFO is currently locked, having completed the full up script.  One more thing for which to be thankful.

I wrote down the settings according to which I tuned the optickle model of the 40m Upgrade.

Basically I set it so that:

1. PRC alone anti-resonant for the carrier and resonant for both sidebands
2. SRC alone resonant for the carrier and resonant for the f2 sideband

In this way when the carrier becomes resonant in the arms we have:

1. carrier resonant in PRC and anti-resonant in SRC
2. f1 resonant in PRC and non resonant in SRC
3. f2 resonant in SRC

The DARM offset for DC readout is optional, and doesn't change those conditions.

I also plotted the carrier and the sideband's circulating power for both recycling cavities.

I'm attaching a file containing more detailed explanations of what I said above. It also contains the plots of field powers, and transfer functions from DARM to the dark port. I think they don't look quite right. There seems to be something wrong.

Valera thought of fixing the problem, removing the 180 degree offset on the SRM, which is what makes the sideband rather than the carrier resonant in SRC. In his model the carrier becomes resonant and the sideband anti-resonant. I don't think that is correct.

The resonant-carrier case is also included in the attachment (the plots with SRMoff=0 deg). In the plots the DARM offset is always zero.

I'm not sure why the settings are not producing the expected transfer functions.

 In my calculation of the digital filters of the optical transfer functions the carrier light is resonant in coupled cavities and the sidebands are resonant in recycling cavities (provided that macroscopic lengths are chosen correctly which I assumed).

Carrier and SB (f2) shouldn't be resonant at the same time in the SRC-arms coupled cavity. No additional filtering of the GW signal is wanted.

The SRC macroscopic length is chosen to be = c / f2 - rather than = [ (n+1/2) c / (2*f2) ] - accordingly to that purpose.

I calculated the frequency of the double cavity pole for the 40m SRC-arm coupled cavity.

w_cc = (1 + r_srm)/(1- r_srm) * w_c

where w_c is the arm cavity pole angular frequency [w_c = w_fsr * (1-r_itm * r_etm)/sqrt(r_itm*r_etm) ]

I found the pole at about 160KHz. This number coincides with what I got earlier with my optickle model configured and tuned as I said in my previous entry. See attachments for plots of transfer functions with 0 and 10pm DARM offsets, respectively.

I think  the resonance at about 20 Hz that you can see in the case with non-zero DARM offset, is due to radiation pressure. Koji suggested that I could check the hypothesis by changing either the mirrors' masses or the input power to the interferometer. When I did it frequency and qualty factor of the resonance changed, as you would expect for a radiation pressure effect.

This gave me more confidence about my optickle model of the 40m. This is quite comforting since I used that model other times in the past to calculate several things (i.e. effects of higher unwanted harmonics from the oscillator, or, recently, the power at the ports due to the SB resonating in the arms).

 Still I didn't see any beat note signals..

 With a help from Suresh, Yuta and Rana, I tried searching for the green beat note by changing the temperature of the X end NPRO.

The noise level after it goes through an RF amplifier (G=23dB) was about -70dBm at 50MHz.

This noise may cover the beat note signal.

I am going to post some details later.

Last night I tried searching for a beat note signal with two different PD trans impedance gains.

Although I didn't find a  beat note signal.

- (1. trans impedance gain = 2400)

 I started with a trans impedance resistance of R=2.4k, which is 10 times bigger resistance than the original.

The total PD gain should be about 960 [V/W] theoretically if we assume the responsibility of the PD is 0.4 [A/W].

Then I checked the bandwidth of the RFPD using Jenne laser.

The bandwidth was about 30MHz, which is 3 times narrower than the original. And it agrees with our expectation.

As Koji and I mentioned at the last weekly meeting, the cut off frequency of an RFPD follows inverse square root of the trans impedance resistance R.

where C is a capacitance of the photo diode. (See this)

I was expecting the signal level of  -50 dBm / rtHz with a 23dB RF amplifier, assuming the line width of the signal is 10kHz.

- (2. trans impedance gain = 240) 

 I also tried it with the original trans impedance gain (see this entry). 

 R = 240 [Ohm]

 G = 96 [V/W]

 BW = 100 [MHz]  (I didn't measure it in this time)

 expected signal level = -70 dBm/rtHz