I spent some time trying to understand how touching the metal cage inside or bending the PCB board affected the photodiode response. It turned out that there was some weak soldering of one of the inductors.

Matt and Koji:

We closed the light doors of the chambers.

We are leaving the PLL as it is locked in order to see the long term stability. And we will check the results in early morning of tomorrow.

DO NOT disturb our PLL !!

(what we did)

After Mott left, Matt and I started to put feedback signals to the temperature control of NPRO.

During doing some trials Matt found that NPRO temperature control input has an input resistance of 10kOhm.

Then we put a flat filter ( just a voltage divider made by a resistor of ~300kOhm and the input impedance ) with a gain of 0.03 for the temperature control to inject a relatively small signal, and we could get the lock with the pzt feedback and it.

In addition, to obtain more stable lock we then also tried to put an integration filter which can have more gain below 0.5Hz.

After some iterations we finally made a right filter which is shown in the attached picture and succeeded in obtaining stable lock.

Now some pedestals, mirrors and lenses are left on the PSL table, since we are on the middle way to construct a PLL setup which employs two NPROs instead of use of PSL laser.

So Please Don't steal any of them.

 Can I please get the network analyzer back?

 Hartmut suggested a possible explanation for the way the electronics transfer function starts picking up at ~50MHz. He said that the 10KOhm resistance in series with the Test Input connector of the box might have some parasitic capacitance that at high frequency lowers the input impedance.

Although Hartmut also admitted that considering the high frequency at which the effect is observed, anything can be happening with the electronics inside of the box.

Matt checked it in this morning and he found it's been locked during the night.

 The same thing happening again.  The intermittent offset upstream of the seismometer that never got fixed.

The granite plate and ball bearings are in. I will place seismometers on it.

In this afternoon, Mott and I tried to find a beat note between two NPROs which are going to be set onto each end table for green locking.

At first time we could not find any beats. However Koji found that the current of innolight NPRO was set to half of the nominal.

Then we increased the current to the nominal of 2A, finally we succeeded in finding a beat note.

Now we are trying to lock the PLL.

P.S. we also succeeded in acquiring the lock

I upgraded the old REFL199 to the new REFL55.

To do that I had to replace the old photodiode inside, switching to a 2mm one.

Electronics and optical transfer functions, non normalized are shown in the attached plot.

The details about the modifications are contained in this dedicated wiki page (Upgrade_09 / RF System / Upgraded RF Photodiodes)

Safety glasses 1064 nm transmission measured at ~200 mW level. They are all good.

Kiwamu and Koji

Last night we have released PRM from the gluing fixture. All of the six magnets are successfully released from the fixture.

We put SRM on the fixuture and glued a side magnet which we had failed at the last gluing.

We let it cure in the Al house. This should be the last magnet gluing until ETMs are delivered.

[Current status]

ITMX (ITMU03): all of magnets/guiderod/standoffs glued, mirror baked; balance to be confirmed
ITMY (ITMU04): all of magnets/guiderod/standoffs glued, balance confirmed, mirror baked
SRM  (SRMU03): magnets/guiderod/standoff glued; a side magnet gluing in process, balance to be confirmed, last stand off to be glued, mirror to be baked
PRM  (SRMU04): magnets/guiderod/standoff glued; balance to be confirmed, last stand off to be glued, mirror to be baked

TT:            magnets/guiderod/standoff glued; balance to be confirmed, last stand off to be glued, mirror to be baked

Last Friday, Matt made a frequency discriminator circuit on a bread board in order to test the idea and study the noise level. I think it will work for phase lock acquisition of Green locking.

As a result a response of 100kHz/V and a noise level of 2uV/rtHz @ 10Hz are yielded. This corresponds to 0.2Hz/rtHz @ 10Hz.

The motivation of using frequency discriminators is that  it makes a frequency range wider and easier for lock acquisition of PLLs in green locking experiment.

For the other possibility to help phase lock acquisition, Rana suggested to use a commercial discriminator from Miteq.

(principle idea)

The diagram below shows a schematic of the circuit which Matt has built.

Basically an input signal is split into two signals right after the input, then one signal goes through directly to a NAND comparator.

On the other hand another split signal goes through a delay line which composed by some RC filters, then arrive at the NAND comparator with a certain amount of delay.

After going through the NAND comparator, the signal looks like a periodic pulses (see below).

If we put a signal of higher frequency we get more number of pulses after passing through the NAND.

Finally the pulse-signal will be integrated at the low pass filter and converted to a DC signal.

Thus the amplitude of DC signal depends on the number of the pulses per unit time, so that the output DC signal is proportional to the frequency of an input signal.

(result)

By putting a TTL high-low signal, an output of the circuit shows 100kHz/V linear response.

It means we can get DC voltage of 1 V if a signal of 100kHz is injected into the input.

And the noise measurement has been done while injecting a input signal. The noise level of 0.2Hz/rtHz @ 10 Hz was yielded.

Therefore we can lock the green PLL by using an ordinary VCO loop after we roughly guide a beat note by using this kind of discriminator.

Not that this is an urgent concern, just a data point which shows that it doesn't just not work at the sites.

I had to restart the dhcpd server on Ottavia that allows us to talk to the camera.  I then also changed the configuration script on the camera so that it no longer thinks ottavia is 131.215.113.97, but correctly 192.168.113.97.  Overall took 5 minutes.

I also looked up services for Centos 5, and set it using the program serviceconf to start the DHCP server  when Ottavia is rebooted now.  That should head off future problems of that nature.  For reference, to start the dhcp server manually, become root and type "service dhcpd start".

Thanks for the great entry!

In order to make this work for higher frequencies, I would add Hartmut's suggestion of a frequency dividing input stage.  If we divide the input down by 100, the overall range will be about 200MHz, and the noise will be about 20Hz/rtHz.  That might be good enough... but we can hope that the commercial device is lower noise!

PRM was released from the fixuture without any trouble. This was the last magnet gluing until ETMs are delivered.

The below is the up-to-date Jenne stat table.

The clean room is getting too narrow. I am thinking that we should install ITMs to the chamber so that we can accommodate SRM/PRM suspensions.

Rana found that we had a frequency counter SR620 which might be helpful for lock acquisition of the green phase lock.

It has a response of 100MHz/V up to 350MHz which is wide range and good for our purpose. And it has a noise level of 200Hz/rtHz @ 10Hz which is 1000 times worse than that Matt made (see the entry).

The attached figure is the noise curve measured while I injected a signal of several 100kHz. In fact I made sure that the noise level doesn't depends on the frequency of an input signal.

The black curve represents the noise of the circuit Matt has made, the red curve represents that of SR620.

When I went to use the elog this morning, it wasn't responding.  I killed the process on nodus, and then restarted, per the 40m wiki instructions.

Its a good measurement - you should adjust the input range of the 620 using the front panel 'scale' buttons to see how the noise compares to Matt's circuit when the range is reduced to 1 MHz. In any case, we would use it in the 350 MHz range mode. What about the noise of the frequency discriminator from MITEQ?

 Teflon feet removed and heavy brass-delrin pd base installed. Ref-cavity reflected light remains to be beautiful doughnut shape on camera.

I went over to Downs today and was able to secure two 8 core machines, along with mounting rails.  These are very thin looking 1U chassis computers. I was told by Rolf the big black box computers might be done tomorrow afternoon.  Alex also kept one of the 8 core machines since he needed to replace a hard drive on it, and also wanted to keep for some further testing, although he didn't specify how long.

I also put in a request with Alex and Rolf for the RCG system to produce code which includes memory location hooks for plant models automatically, along with a switch to flip from the real to simulated inputs/outputs.

Recorded transfer functions for the 1cm Si-PD as described on p. 2708

for different biases. I put the plots in there, to keep the info in one place,

where the label on the PD case (which Steve made without asking him) points

to.

I talked to some people recently about the fact that the responsivity (A/W) of the PD

changes even at DC for different biases. I tested this again and should be more precise about this:

The first time I observed this was in the transfer functions as shown on p. 2708.

With 'DC' I meant 'low frequency' there, as you can still see an effect of the bias as low as 100kHz.

Then at one point I saw the responsivity changing with bias also at true DC.

However, it turned out that this is only the case if the photocurrent is too high.

If the photocurrent is 4mA, you need 400mV bias to get the max. responsivity.

For 2mA photocurrent, the responsivity is already maximal for 0V bias.

An effect for relative low frequencies remains however.

The DC check of responsivity was done with white light from a bulb.

Kiwamu and I measure the PZT response of the Innolight this evening from 24 kHz to 2MHz.  

We locked the PLL at ~50 MHz offset using the Lightwave NPRO and and swept the Innolight with the network analyzer (using the script I made; it has one peculiar property, but it does work correctly).  

We will post the plot of the Lightwave PZT response tomorrow morning.

**EDIT**: As Koji pointed out, the calibration factor on this plot is WRONG.  See my more recent update for the correctly calibrated plot.

The shape of the TF looks nice but the calibration must be wrong.

Suppose 1/f slope with 10^-4 rad/V at 100kHz. i.e. m_pm = 10/f rad/V
This means m_fm = 10 Hz/V. This is 10^6 times smaller than that of LWE NPRO.

(Edit: Corrected some numbers but it is not significant)

 Koji is absolutely right.  I just double checked my matlab code, and saw that I divided when I should have multiplied.  The correctly calibrated plots are attached here for the Innolight and the lightwave.  Kiwamu and I will measure the amplitude and the jitter today.

Innolight: 100rad/V @ 100kHz  => 1e7/f rad/V => 10MHz/V

LWE: 500rad/V @ 100kHz =>  5e7/f rad/V => 50MHz/V

They sound little bit too big, aren't they?

The Lightwave NPRO should be around 5 MHz/V. 

The Innolight PZT coefficient is ~1.1 MHz/V.

(both are from some Rick Savage LHO elog entries)

just a few infos on Silicon PDs I looked up.

If you want to go beyond the 100MHz achievable with the device I worked on,

the one thing to improve is the opamp, where Steve is trying to find OPA657.

This is a FET with 1.6GHz BWP, minimum stable gain of 7, and 4.8nV/rt(Hz) noise.

Should be ok with 750-1000 Ohm transimpedance.

The other thing you might want to change is the PD

(although it might be the 1cm PD with high bias is as fast as smaller ones with lower bias).

There are two types of other Si diodes at the 40m right now (~3mm):

-Rana and I found a Centronic OSD 15-5T in the old equipment

-Frank gave me a Hamamatsu S1223-01 on a Thorlabs pre-amp device (could be taken out).

The Centronic OSD 15-5T has up to 80pF with 12 V bias according to the datasheet.

The Hamamatsu S1223-01 is stated with 20pF only, but stated to have a max. frequency resp. of 20MHz ('-3db point').

I dont know what this means, as the corner freq. of 10pF into 50Ohm is still 160MHz.

In any case there are faster 3mm types to start with, as for example Hamamatsu S3399 (~ 90$),

which is stated to have the corner at 100MHz with 50 Ohm load.

For this type the stated capacity (20pF) looks consistent with ~100MHz corner into 50 Ohm.

So probably you can get higher BW with this one using much smaller load, as in transimpedance stage.

Steve and Koji

- We removed old ITMX/Y from the chambers. Now they are temporarily placed on the flow table at the end. Steve is looking for nice storages for the 5inch optics.

- We wiped new ITMX/Y by isopropanol as they were dusty.

- We put them into the corresponding towers. Checked the balancing and magnet arrangements with the OSEMs. They were totally fine.

- We clamped the mirrors by the EQ stops. Wrapped the towers by Al foils.

Tomorrow we will put them into the chambers.

 We realized that we had measured the wrong calibration value; we were using the free-running error signal with the marconi far from the beat frequency, which was very small.  When we put the Marconi right at the beat, the signal increased by a factor of ~12 (turning our original calibration of 10 mV/rad into 120 mV/rad).  The re-calibrated plots are attached. 

Innolight 10 rad/V @ 100kHz => 1e6/f rad/V => 1MHz/V

LWE 30 rad/V @ 100kHz => 3e6/f rad/V => 3MHz/V

---------

BTW, don't let me calculate the actuator response everytime.

The elog (=report) should be somewhat composed by the following sections

Motivation - Method - Result (raw results) - Discussion (of the results)

 We measured the Amplitude Modulation response of the PZTs, to find regions with large phase modulation but small amplitude modulation.

We did this by blocking 1 arm of the PLL, feeding the source output of the Network Analyzer into the PZT input of the laser in question, and reading the output of the PD on the NA.  We calibrated by dividing by the DC voltage of the PD (scaled by the ratio of the AC gain to DC gain of the New Focus PD).

The AM response of the Innolight looks fairly smooth up to ~1MHz, and it is significantly below the PM response for most of its range.  The region between 20 and 30 kHz shows very good separation of about 10^3 rad/RIN (and up to 10^5 rad/RIN at ~21.88 kHz, where there is the negative spike in the AM response). The region between 1.5 MHz and 2MHz also looks viable if it is desirable to actuate at higher frequencies.

The Lightwave offers very good AM/PM separation up to about 500 kHz, but becomes quite noisy about 1MHz.

I made a simple PD test circuit which may allow to test PD response up to few 100MHz.

Its not for low noise, only for characterising PD response.

Here is the circuit:

The 2 capacitor values (for bypassing) are kind of arbitrary, just what I found around

(one medium, one small capacity). Could be improved by better RF types (e.g. Mica).

The PD type has no meaning. I put in the Centronic 15-T5 for a start.

The bias can be up to 20V for this diode.

The signal appears across R1. It is small, to make a large bandwidth.

R2 is just for slightly decoupling the signal from the following RF amplifier.

The wire into the RF amplifier is short (~cm). And the amplifier is supposed to have 50 Ohm

input impedance.

I use a mini circuits ZFL 500 here.

power supply for this is 15V.

i just restarted the elog for the third time in the past 12 hours.

I checked the elog.log file to debug the problem. It doesn't contain eveidence of any particular cause, except for png/jpg file uploads happened last night.

I'm not sure we can blame Image Magic again because the last crash seems to be occurred just after an entry with e jpg picture was included in the body of the message. I think Image Magic is used only for previews of attachments like pdfs or ps.

Maybe we should totally disable image magic.

These are the dark noise spectrum that I measured on the 11MHz and 55MHz PD prototypes I modified.

The plots take into account the 50Ohm input impedance of the spectrum analyzer (that is, the nosie is divided by 2).

With an estimated transimpedance of about 300Ohm, I would expect to have 2-3nV/rtHz at all frequencies except for the resonant frequencies of each PD. At those resonances I would expect to have ~15nV/rtHz (cfr elog entry 2760).

Problems:

1. For the 55MHz PD the resonance peak is too small
2. In the 55 MHz: noise is present at about 7MHz
3. In the 11MHz PD there's a lot of noise below 10 MHz.

I have to figure out what are the sources of such noises.

Suggestions?

I was checking into the Guralp situation today. I put the rubber balls underneath the granite block (the Q is too high), but found unfortunately that Jenne's styrofoam box is too short to cover the Guralps on top of the granite. If the box was skinny enough to fit on the block or taller by ~6 inches, it would be perfect. We need some new Seismo boxes.

Here's the story of the Gur2 noise so far. We need to pull out and repair the breakout box.

1) At some point we noticed that the Guralp2 X channel was behaving badly.

2) Steve tried recentering with just a +12V supply - this didn't work. Jenne then centered it using the +/- 12V supply. This was OK.

3) Around noon on March 24, the channel 'goes bad' again.

4) On the afternoon of the 25th, most of the channels go to zero, but the GUR2X channel stays bad. There's NO ENTRY in the elog about this. This is UNACCEPTABLE. Apparently, the seismometers were disconnected without shutting off the power to the box. You MUST elog everything - otherwise, go home and sit on your hands.

5) On the evening of the 31st, Steve turns off the Guralp breakout box. From the trend, you can see that the signals all go to zero at that time.

6) From then until today, there is no noise in the GUR2X channel. From these tests we can guess that the problem is in the GUR2X channel of the breakout box, but not in the AA Chassis or the ADC, since those showed no excess noise with the box turned OFF. Its hard to be sure without elog entries, but I assume that 3/25-3/31 was a 'seismometer disconnected', but 'box on' state.

Large earthquake shakes Baja California, Mexico and 6 over Magnitude 5 aftershakes follow.  The frontend computers are still down since Friday.

Steve and Koji (Friday, Apr 02)

Summary

Intsallation of ITMs are going on. Two new ITMs were placed on the optical table in the vacuum chambers. ITM for the south arm was put at the right place in accordance to the CAD drawing. ITM for the east arm is still at a temporaly place.

Tower placement (10:30-11:30)

- Put the tower on the table at a temporary place such that we can easily work on the OSEMs.

ITM (South arm) (14:00-16:30)

- Put the tower on the table at a temporary place such that we can easily work on the OSEMs.

- Leveled the table approximately.

- Released the EQ stops

- Removed anchors for the OSEM cables as it was too short. The wire distribution will be changed later.

- Put the OSEMs. Adjust the insertion to the middle of the OSEM ranges.

- Clamped the EQ stops again

- Placed the tower to the right place according to the CAD drawing.

- Released the EQ stops again.

- Check the OSEM values. The LL sensor showed small value (~0.5). Needs to be adjusted.

ITM (South) damping adjustment

- Found the signs for the facing magnets are reversed.

- Otherwise it damps very well.

After adding an inductor L=100uH and a resistor R=10Ohm in parallel after the OP547A opamp that provide the bias for the photodiode of REFL11, the noise at low frequency that I had observed, was significantly reduced.

See this plot:

A closer inspection of the should at 11MHz in the noise spectrum, showed some harmonics on it, spaced with about 200KHz. Closing the RF cage and the box lid made them disappear. See next plot:

The full noise spectrum looks like this:

A big bump is present at ~275MHz. it could important if it also shows up on the shot noise spectrum.

 The cabling on the seismic stack was rerouted so it could reach the south edge of the table: the cables  were removed from the viton padded clamps and repositioned this morning.

ITM-south tower's earthquake screw viton tips could be a little bit larger. They do not stay in their screw hole after a hard clamping action.

4-40 earthquake screws under the test mass:viton tips can fall out without action, the treads are cross threaded so the screws are wobbling

This morning, at about 12 Koji found all the front-ends down.

At 1:45pm rebooted ISCEX, ISCEY, SOSVME, SUSVME1, SUSVME2, LSC, ASC, ISCAUX

Then I burtestored ISCEX, ISCEY, ISCAUX to April 2nd, 23:07.

The front-ends are now up and running again.

 I restored damping to all SUSes except ITM-east. The ITMX OSEMs are being used in the clean assembly room.

Lately I've been trying to sort out the problem of the discrepancy that I noticed between the values read on the spectrum analyzer's display and what we get with the GPIB interface.

It turns out that the discrepancy originates from the two data vector that the display and the GPIB interface acquire. Whereas the display shows data in "RAW" format, the GPIB interface, for the way the netgpibdata script is written, acquires the so called "error-corrected data". That is the GPIB downloaded data is postprocessed and corrected for some internal calibration factors of the instrument.

 I noticed that someone, that wasn't me, has edited the wiki page about the netgpibdata under my name saying:

 " [...]

* A4395 Spectrum Units
Independetly by which unites are displayed by the A4395 spectrum analyzer on the screen, the data is saved in Watts/rtHz"

Kiwamu and Koji

ITMY (south) was aligned with regard to the 40m-long oplev with the green laser pointer. Now the cavity is waiting for the green light injected from the end table

Some tools and the level gauge were removed from the table.

BAD news: I could clearly see scatter of the green beam path because of the dusts in the arm tube. Also many dusts are seen on the ITM surface.

Picture of the ETM - reflection from the ITM is hitting the mirror and the suspension structures.

1. Shoot the ITM center with the green beam.

- Two persons with walkie-talkies required for this work.

- Turn on the end green pointer. We could see the long trace of the beam sliced by the beam tube wall.

- Look at the tube peeping mirror for the CCD.

- Adjust yaw such that the beam trace on the tube wall is parallel to the arm.

- Adjust pitch such that the beam trace on the tube gets longer. This means that spot gets closer to the ITM.

- Continue pitch adjustment until some scatter appears on the ITM tower.

- Once the spot appears on the tower, you can easily adjust it on the mirror

2. Adjust pitch/yaw bias such that the reflection hits the ETM.

- Initially the ITM alignment is totally bad. ==> You clealy see the spot on the wall somewhere close to the ITM.

- Adjust pitch/yaw bias such that the spot goes farther as far as possible.

- Once you hit the suspension tower, the scatter is obviously seen from the peeping mirror.

- You can match the incident beam and the scattering of the reflection. You also can see the reflection from the ETM towards the ITM as the spot size gets huge (1/2 tube diameter).

- We found that the bias is ~-2 for pitch and ~-6 for yaw.

3. Go into the chamber. Check the table leveling.

- Open the light door.

- I found that the table is not leveled. Probably it drifted after the move of the weight (i.e. MOS removal).

- Removed one of the round-shaped weight. Moved the other weights such that the table was leveled.

4. Remove the bias for yaw and rotate suspension tower such that the reflection hit the center of the ETM.

- Removed the yaw bias. This makes the reflected spot totally off from the ETM.

- Rotate suspension tower so that the beam can approximately hit the ETM.

- Look at the peeping mirror, the beam is aligned to the ETM.

5. Adjust OSEMs

- Push/pull the OSEMs such that we have the OSEM outputs at the half of the full scale.

6. Adjust alignment by the bias again.

- Moving OSEMs changes the alignment. The pitch/yaw biases were adjusted to have the beam hitting on the ETM.

- Bias values at  the end of the work: Pitch -0.8159 / Yaw -1.2600

7. Close up the chamber

- Remove the tools and the level gauge.

- Close the light door.

#
#                 gnd
#                 |
#                 Cw2
#                 |
#                 n23
#                 |
#                 Lw2
#                 |
#   gnd           n22
#   |             |
#   Rip           Rw2
#   |             |                   |\
#   nt- Rsi-n2- - - C2 - n3 -  - -  - |  \
#            |    |      |   |        |4106>-- n5 - Rs -- no                                                            
# iinput    Rd   L1     L2 R24    n6- |  /     |           |
#    |- nin- |    |      |   |    |   |/       |         Rload
#           Cd   n7     R22 gnd   |            |           |
#            |    |      |        | - - - R8 - -          gnd
#           gnd  R1     gnd      R7
#                 |               |
#                gnd             gnd
#
#
#

What??? I don't see any gray trace of Rs in the plot. What are you talking about?

Anyway, if you are true, the circuit is bad as the noise should only be dominated by the thermal noise of the resonant circuit.