I tried applying the changes but they didn't work. It seems that nodus doesn't like the command syntax.

I have to go through the problem...

The elog is up again.

The 40m produces a large amount of paper and cardboard waste. It would be worth it if we disposed those kind of garbages for recycling.

I set up two new garbage bins in the lab: one in the control rooms that adds up to the can/bottle recycling bin, and one other one in the office area, next to the printer for general paper disposal.

People in the lab are strongly invited to make use of the two new garbage bins and recycle their paper and cardboard waste.

Boxes can be larger than the garbage bin, so I'd recommend people to crash them before throwing them into the bin.

I'm working on the AP table. I also opened the auxiliary NPRO shutter. The auxiliary beam is on its path on the AP table and PSL table.

 Closing the AP table and the NPRO shutter now.

I'm working on the AP table. I also opened the auxiliary NPRO shutter. The auxiliary beam is on its path on the AP table and PSL table.

Last night something happened on the beat between the PSL beam and the auxiliary NPRO beam, that spoiled the quality of the beating I had before. As a result the PLL has become unable to lock the two lasers.

The amplitude of the beat at the spectrum analyzer has gone down to -40 dBm from -10 that it was earlier. The frequency has also become more unstable so that now it can be seen writhing within tens of KHz.

Meanwhile the power of the single beams at the PLL photodiode hasn't changed, suggesting that the alignment of the two beam didn't change much.

Changes in the efficiency of the beating between the two beams are not unusual. Although that typically affects only the amplitude of the beat and wouldn't explain why also its frequency has become unstable. Tuning the alignment of the PLL optics usually brings the amplitude back, but it was uneffective today.

It looks like something changed in either one of the two beams. In particular the frequency of one of the two lasers has become less stable.

Another strange thing that I've been observing is that the amplitude of the beat goes down (several dBm) as the beat frequency is pushed below 50 MHz. Under 10 MHz it even gets to about -60 dBm.

I noticed the change yesterday evening at about 6pm, while I was taking measurements of the PLL open loop tranfer function and everything was fine. I don't know whether it is just a coincidence or it is somehow related to this, but Jenne and Sanjit had then just rebooted the frame builder.

 I confirm what I said earlier. The amplitude of the beat is -10 dBm at 300MHz. It goes down at lower frequencies. In particular it gets to-60 dBm below 20 MHz. For some strange reason that I couldn't explain the beating efficiency has become poorer at low frequencies.

 NPRO shutter closed

Problem found. Inspecting with Koji we found that there was a broken SMA-to-BNC connector in the BNC cable from the photodiode.

I measured the open loop gain of the PLL in the AbsL experiment.

I repeated the measurement twice: one with gain knob on the universal PDH box g=3.0; the second measurement with g=6.0

The UGF were 60 KHz and 100 KHz, respectively.

That means that one turn of the knob equals to about +10 dB.

I closed the shutter of the NPRO for the night.

Requesting coeff update at 0x40f220 w/size of 0x1e44
No response from EPICS 

 I found the red sea when I came in this morning.

I tried several things.

1. ssh into fb40m: connection refused
2. telnet fb40m 8087: didn't respond
3. shutdown fb40m by physically pushing the power button: it worked and the FB came back to life but still with a red light on the MEDM DAQ_DETAIL screen;
4. powercycled fb40m AND C0DAQCTRL: no improvement
5. shutdown fb40m, C0DAQCTRL, C1DCUEPICS and pushed the reset button on the RF network crate; then I restarted the computers in this order: fb40m, C1DCUEPICS, C0DAQCTRL: it worked: they came back to life and the lights eventually turned green on the MEDM montior screen

I'm now going to restart the single front -ends and burtgooey them if necessary.

Requesting coeff update at 0x40f220 w/size of 0x1e44
No response from EPICS 

Everything is back on.

Restarted all the front ends. As usual c1susvme2 was stubborn  but eventually it came up.

I burt-restored all the front-ends to Nov 26 at 8am.

The mode cleaner is locked.

Today I measured the max output power at the EOM output of one of the RF AM Stabilizers that we use to control the modulation depth. I needed to know that number for the designing of the new RF system.

When the EPICS slider of the 166 MHz modulation depth is at 0 the modulation depth is max (the slider's values are reversed : 0 is max, 5 is min; it is also 0 for any value above 5, sepite it range from 0 to 10).

I measured 9.5V from the EOM output, that is 32 dBm on a 50 Ohm impedance.

Alberto, Kiwamu, Koji,

this morning we found the RFM network and all the front-ends down.

To fix the problem, we first tried a soft strategy, that is, we tried to restart CODAQCTRL and C1DCUEPICS alone, but it didn't work.

We then went for a big bootfest. We first powered off fb40m, C1DCUEPICS, CODAQCTRL, reset the RFM Network switch. Then we rebooted them in the same order in which we turned them off.

Then we power cycled and restarted all the front-ends.

Finally we restored all the burt snapshots to Monday Dec 7th at 20:00.

I found all the front-ends, except for C1SUSVME1 and C0DCU1 down this morning. DAQAWG shows up green on the C0DAQ_DETAIL screen but it is on a "bad" satus.

I'll go for a big boot fest.

I temporarily disconnected the Heliax cable that brings the 166MHz LO to the LSC rack.

I'm doing a couple of measurement and I'll put it back in as soon as I'm done.

I replaced the SMA end connector for the 166 MHZ Local Oscillator signal that goes to the back of the flange in the 1Y2 rack. The connector had got damaged after it twisted when I was tigheting the N connector of the Heliax cable on the front panel.

 These are the losses I measured on a RG-174 cable for the two frequencies that we're planning to use in the Upgrade:

@11MHz Loss=0.22dBm/meter

@55MHz Loss=0.41dBm/meter

(The cable was 2.07m long. The input signal was +10dBm and the output voltages at the oscilloscope where: Vpk-pk(11MHz)=1.90V, Vpk-pk(11MHz)=1.82V )

I apologize for the lack of correctness on the units in yesterday's elog entry, but I wasn't very sharp last night.

I repeated the measurement today, this time also making sure that I had a 50ohm input impedance set in the scope. These the results for the losses.

 I also measured the losses in the Heliax cable going from the 166 MHz LO to the LSC rack:

 I'm leaving the lab now for less than 2 hours. I should be back in time for when the pumping is finished so that I can measure the finesse again.

I did the measurement on a 4.33 meter long cable with SMA connectors at the ends.

 I'm going to do it right now.

Last week we vented and we cleaned the main optics of the arm cavities.

I measured the frequency of the cavity poles for both the arm cavities to see how they changed (see previous elog entry 2226). These the results:

fp_X = 1616 +/- 14 Hz

fp_Y = 1590 +/- 4 Hz

 The Y arm cavity pole moved down by 130 Hz, whereas the X arm moved by only 34 Hz. I wonder if that is because Kiwamu spent much more time on cleaning ITMY than on any other optic.

The way the filter's transfer function has been measured is by a swept sine between the "SERVO INPUT" and the "PIEZO DRIVE OUTPUT" connection on the box front panel. The spectrum analyzer used for the measurement is the SR785 and the source amplitude is set at 0.1V.

The two transfer functions are clearly different. In particular the old one looks like a simple integrator, whereas the new one already includes some sort of boost.

That probably explains why the new one is unable to lock the PLL. Indeed what the PLL needs, at least to acquire lock, is an 1/f filter.

I thought the two boxes were almost identical, at least in the filter shapes. Also the two schematics available in the DCC coincide.

Yesterday I measured the Open Loop Gain of the PLL in the absolute length experiment. The servo I used was that of the old Universal PDH box.

The OLG looks like this:

The UGF is at 10 KHz.

The elog has been quite slow for the last two days. The cause is nodus, that has been slowing down the access to it.

I looked at the list of the running processes on nodus by typing the command prstat, which is the equivalent for Solaris of the Linux "top". I didn't see any particular process that might be absorbing too many resources.

I remember Rana fixing the same problem in the past but couldn't find his elog entry about that. Maybe we should just restart nodus, unless someone has some other suggestion.

 Problem solved. Nodus and the elog are running fine. It's just that the elog takes some time to make a preview of complex pdf attachments, like those in Kiwamu's entry 2405.

Since it wasn't sure whether all the front-ends had been restored after the bootfest, I burtrestored everything to Dec 26 at 20:00.

Always keep in mind that to burtrestore c1dcuepics, the snapshot file has to be modified by hand by moving the last quote up to the line before the last.

I opened the auxiliary laser's shutter.

I'm currently working on the AP table.

 I finished working on the table.

I closed the AUX NPRO's shutter.

This morning I found all the watchdogs had tripped during the night.

I restored them all.

I can't damp ITMX. I noticed that its driving matrix is all 1s and -1s as the the right values had been lost in some previous burtrestoring.

FYI: I stored the Universal PDH boxes in the RF cabiner in the Y arm.

In the lab there are lots of old posters with outdated autocad drawings, or printouts with schematics of old electronics hanging on the walls.

Can we get rid of those and start giving the lab a fresh and modern look?

This morning I found that there was no light on the SPOB PD. I went looking at the photodetector and I found that the shutter in front of it was closed.

I switched the shutter driver from n.c. to n.o. which had the effect of opening it.

I guess we inadvertently closed the shutter with Rana when last week we were tinkering with the ITMY  camera.

This morning I've been having problems in trying to lock the X arm.

That doesn't seem to have solved the problem. The X arm can get locked but TRX slowly moves between 0.2 and 1.

The X arm is now locked with TRX stable at ~1.

I think earlier on today I was having problems with running the alignment scripts from op540. Now I'm controlling the IFO from Rosalba and I can easily and stably lock all degrees of freedom.

I needed the X arm to be locked to align the auxiliary beam of the AbsL experiment to the IFO. To further stabilize TRX I increased the loop gain from 1 to 1.5.

Now the auxiliary beam is well aligned to the IFO and the beat is going through the PRC. I'm finally ready to scan the recycling cavity.

I also changed the gain of the PRC loop from -0.1 to -0.5.

Rana noticed that recently the temperature inside the lab has been a little bit too high. That might be causing some 'unease' to the computers with the result of making them crash more often.

For the next hours I'll be paying attention to the temperature inside the lab to make sure that it doesn't go out of control and that the environment gets too cold.

I'm working on the AbsL experiment. A measurement which involved the PRC locked is running at the moment.

Please make sure of not interfering with the interferometer until it is done. Thank you.

 Today the lab is perceptibly cooler.

The temperature around the corner is 73 F.

 I'm done for the moement.

I realized that I need to take into account somehow the DC power from the photodiode. By now the measurement of the transmitted beat's power is affected by the total power circulating inside of the PRC and thus it depends on the cavity alignment.

I closed the laser shutter and turned down the flipping mirrors.

I'm planning to restart measuring by 2.30pm today. Till then the interferometer is available.

I'm currently running a measurement on the PRC.

Please don't interfere with the IFO until it is done. Talk with Alberto if you've been intending to work inside the lab.

Thank you.

Leaving for dinner. Back in ~1hr.

I left a measurement running. Please don't interfere with it till I'm back. Thanks.

I finished measuring the AbsL for this morning. The IFO is again available.

Please don't mess up with the interferometer though. I'll be back in a couple of ours