Kevin and I meaured the transfer function of the photodiode circuit using the Jenne laser and agilent in the 40m lab. The attached figures depict our measured transfer function over the modulation frequency ranges of 30kHz-30MHz and 1kHz-30MHz when the power of the laser was set to 69 and 95 μW. These plots indicate a clear roll off frequency around 300 kHz. In addition, the plots beginning at 1kHz display unstable behavior at frequencies below 30kHz. I am not sure why there is such a sharp change in the transfer function around 30kHz, but I suspect this to be due to an issue with the agilent or photodiode. 

 I have done the following:

  * installed the nds2-client in /ligo/apps/nds2-client

  * moved the nds2 configuration directories to /ligo/apps/nds2/nds2-megatron

  * set up a cron job to update the channel list every morning at 5 am. The cron line is:

     15 5 * * * /usr/bin/nds2_nightly /ligo/apps/nds2/channel-tracker /ligo/apps/nds2/nds2-megatron

    cron will send an email each time the channel list changes, at which point you will have to restart the server with:

     cd /ligo/apps/nds2/nds2-megatron
     pkill nds2
     ./start-nds2

  * restarted nds2 with updated channel lists.

     15 5 * * * /usr/bin/nds2_nightly /ligo/apps/nds2/channel-tracker /ligo/apps/nds2/nds2-megatron

     cd /ligo/apps/nds2/nds2-megatron
     pkill nds2
     ./start-nds2

 I have set the cron job up to restart the nds2 server automatically if the channel list changes. The only change is that the cron command was changes to /ligo/apps/nds2/nds2-megatron/test-restart.

The upgrade of megatron broke the nds2 service. I have fixed things by

  1) installing the latest version of framecpp (1.19.32) from the lsc debian repository (this was necessary because I couldn't link to the existing version)

  2) built nds2-server-0.5.11 and installed it in the system directories (/usr/bin)

  3) there were a few scripts/links/etc that didn't seem to be set up correctly and I fixed them to correspond with my preious message.

 nds2 is now running and the channel list should be updated regularly and the service restarted as appropriate.

Here's a Finesse modeling of what we're expecting to observe with this test. It uses Gautam's base model of the 40m IFO with appropriate modifications for the needed configuration.

The idea is to lock the IFO in the SRMI configuration, with the phase-locked AUX beam injected from the AS port. The AUX beam is imprinted with AM sidebands and slightly misaligned relative to the SRC so as to transfer power into HOM1. The RF network analyzer provides the drive signal for the AOM, and its frequency is swept to coherently measure the transfer function [reflected AUX beam / drive]. The reflected AUX beam is sensed by the AS110 PDA10CF.

It is also possible to drive PM sidebands as Koji suggests, but the squeezer group has encouraged using AM for practical advantages. The SNR with AM is a bit higher (less power lost into harmonics at large modulation index), there is a broadband AOM already available aligned to the SQZ beam at LLO, and there is also concern that driving strong PM could interfere with the SQZ control loops.

Expected SRMI Response

Attachment #1 shows the expected response to swept-AM in SRMI. Resolving just the FSR and the first-order mode splitting is sufficient to extract the SRC Gouy phase.

Expected DRMI Response

Since the 40m has not been opearted in SRMI since ~2016 (last done by Eric Q.), Gautam believes it may take some time to relock this configuration. However, the modeling indicates that we can likely obtain sufficient sensitivity in DRMI, which would allow us to proceed faster. Attachment #2 shows the expected response to swept-AM in DRMI. The PRC leakage signal turns out to be significantly smaller than the SRC reflection (a factor of ~30 in amplitude), so that the signal still retains its characteristic shape to a very good approximation. The tradeoff is a 10x reduction in SNR due to increased PSL shot noise reaching AS110.

Based on this, we should proceed with DRMI scans instead of PRMI next week.

Not much progress today with the AUX cavity scans. I've determined there still are some alignment issues.

At the start of today a large AUX/PSL beat note was visible on the AS110 sensor, at a similar power as where we left off last night (-60 dBm). Proceeding from there, I attempted to reproduce Johannes' measurement of the cavity transmission resonances. I misaligned the X-arm, locked the Y-arm cavity, and scanned the AUX RF offset approximately 8 MHz in 2 kHz steps. This should have swept through two FSRs, but nothing was visible.

Further inspection revealed that none of the PSL light was making it back to through the AUX fiber to the PSL table. I take this to mean that the beam seen earlier on AS110 was the ITMY reflection, and that the AUX injection axis was no longer reaching ETMY. I also found that the AUX beam size just after the 90/10 beasmsplitter looks anomolously large. Maybe a lens was recently changed? In any case, the mode-matching looks like it is going to need to be readjusted.

[Jon, Keerthana, Sandrina]

Yesterday we carried out preliminary proof-of-concept measurements using the new AS-port-injected AUX laser to resolve cavity mode resonances.

At the time we started, I found the beat note levels consistent with what Johannes had reported the night before post-realignment. Hence we did not change the AUX alignment.

Test 1: YARM Mode Scan

• IFO locked in YARM configuration on carrier.
• Confirmed the presence of a -80 dBm beat note on the temporary YEND broadband PD (i.e., at the cavity transmission).
• Slowly canned the RF offset of the AUX laser from 50 MHz (nominal) to 60 MHz in 10 kHz steps.
• Attachment 1 shows the measured scan in "max hold" mode. The bottom panel is the transmission spectrum and the top panel is the reflection, with the AUX/PSL carrier-carrier beat note visible to the far left. In addition to the FSR, it looks to me like the scan resolves at least two HOMs.

Test 2: PRC Mode Scan

• IFO locked in PRMI configuration on carrier.
• Moved the temporary 150 MHz PDA10CF from the YEND to an unused pickoff of the REFL33 beam (i.e., the PRC transmission of the AUX beam). There was an existing 50-50 beamsplitter just before REFL33 whose reflected beam was directed onto a beam dump. The PD is now placed in that location. The modification to the AS table is shown in Attachment 2.
• We made a similar slow scan of the AUX RF offset over ~35 MHz in 10 kHz steps.
• We resolve the 22 MHz FSR, but it is apparent that an incoherent "max-hold" analyzer measurement is inadequate. The problem is that in max-hold mode, because the 11 MHz-spaced PSL sidebands also beat with the AUX subcarrier, we measure a messy superposition of the PSLcarrier-AUXcarrier beat AND all of the PSLsideband-AUXcarrier beats. The next step is to use the AOM to make a coherent measurement at only the frequency of PSL/AUX carrier-carrier beat.

The SURFs have the data from last night's scans and will be separately posting plots of these measurements. We'll continue today with mode scans using AM sidebands rather than the AUX RF offset.

[Jon, Keerthana, Sandrine]

Thu.-Fri. we continued with PRC scans using the AUX laser, but now the "scanned" parameter is the frequency of AM sidebands, rather than the frequency of the AUX carrier itself. The switch to AM (or PM) allows us to coherently measure the cavity transfer as a function of modulation frequency.

In order to make a sentinel measurement, I installed a broadband PDA255 at an unused pickoff behind the first AUX steering mirror on the AS table. The sentinel PD measures the AM actually imprinted on the light going into the IFO, making our measurement independent of the AOM response. This technique removes not only the (non-flat) AOM transfer function, but also any non-linearities from, e.g., overdriving the AOM. The below photo shows the new PD (center) on the AS table.

With the sentinel PD installed, we proceeded as follows.

• Locked IFO in PRMI on carrier.
• Locked AUX PLL to PSL.
• Tuned the frequency of the AUX laser (via the RF offset) to bring the carrier onto resonance with the PRC.
• Swept the AOM modulation frequency 0-60 MHz while measuring the AUX reflection and injection signals.

The below photo shows the measured transfer function [AUX Reflection / AUX Injection]. The measurement coherence is high to ~55 MHz (the AOM bandwidth is 60 MHz). We clearly resolve two FSRs, visible as Lorentzian dips at which more AUX power couples into the cavity. The SURFs have these data and will be separately posting figures for the measurements.

With the basic system working, we attempted to produce HOMs, first by partially occluding the injected AUX beam with a razor blade, then by placing a thin two-prong fork in the beam path. We also experimented with using a razor blade on the output to partially occlude the reflection beam just before the sensor. We were able to observe an apparent secondary dip indicative of an HOM a few times, as shown below, but could not repeat this deterministically. Besides not having fine control over the occlusion of the beams, there is also large few-Hz angular noise shaking the AS beam position. I suspect from moment to moment the HOM content is varying considerably due to the movement of the AS beam relative to the occluding object. I'm now thinking about more systematic ways to approach this.

Thanks to a discussion yesterday with Joe Betzweiser, I was able to identify and fix the remaining problem with the LLO GigE camera software. It is working now, currently only on rossa, but can be set up on all the machines. I've started a wiki page with documentation and usage instructions here:

https://wiki-40m.ligo.caltech.edu/Electronics/GigE_Cameras

This page is also linked from the main 40m wiki page under "Electronics."

This software has the ability to both stream live camera feeds and to record feeds as .avi files. It is described more on the wiki page.

In order to use the 0th-order deflection beam from the AOM for cavity mode scans, I've coaligned this beam to the existing mode-matching/launch optics set up for the 1st-order beam.

Instead of being dumped, the 0th-order beam is now steered by two 45-degree mirrors into the existing beam path. The second mirror is on a flip mount so that we can quickly switch between 0th-order/1st-order injections. None of the existing optics were touched, so the 1st-order beam alignment should still be undisturbed.

Currently the 0th-order beam is being injected into the IFO. After attenuating so as to not exceed 100 mW incident on the fiber, approximately 50 mW of power reaches the AS table. That coupling efficiency is similar to what we have with the 1st-order beam. With the Y-arm cavity locked and the AUX PLL locked at RF offset = 47.60 MHz (an Y-arm FSR), I observed a -50 dBm beat note at Y-end transmission.

I made the first successful AUX laser scan of a 40m cavity last night.

Attachment #1 shows the measured Y-end transmission signal w.r.t. the Agilent drive signal, which was used to sweep the AUX carrier frequency. This is a distinct approach from before, where the carrier was locked at a fixed offset from the PSL carrier and the frequency of AM sidebands was swept instead. This AUX carrier-only technique appears to be advantageous.

This 6-15 MHz scan resolves three FSR peaks (TEM00 resonances) and at least six other higher-order modes. The raw data are also enclosed (attachment #2). I'll leave it as an excercise for the SURFs to compute the Y-arm cavity Gouy phase.

More progress on the AUX-laser cavity scans.

Changes to the Setup

• For scans, the Agilent is now being used as a standalone source of the LO signal provided to the AUX PLL (instead of the Marconi), which sets the RF offset. We discovered that when the sweep is "held" in network analyzer mode, it does not turn off the RF drive signal, but rather continues outputting a constant signal at the hold frequency. This eliminates the need to use the more complicated double-deomdulation previously in use. The procedure is to start and immediately hold the sweep, then lock the PLL, then restart the sweep. The PLL is able to reliably remain locked for frequency steps of up to ~30 kHz. The SURFs are preparing schematics of both the double- and single-demodulation techniques.
• Both the Marconi and Agilent are now phase-locked to the 10 MHz time reference provided by the rabidium clock. This did noticeably shift the measured resonance frequencies.
• I raised the PI controller gain setting to 4.5, which seems to better suppress the extra noise being injected.
• I've procured a set of surgical needles for occluding the beam to produce HOMs. However, I have not needed to use them so far, as the TEM00 purity of the AUX beam appears to already be low. The below scans show only the intrinisic mode content.

New Results

• YARM scan at 70 uW injection power (Attachment #1). The previously reported YARM scan was measured with 9 mW of injected AUX power, 100x larger than the power available from the SQZ laser at the sites. This scan repeats the measurement with the AUX power attenuated to uW. It still resolves the FSR and at least three HOMs.
• PRC scan (Attachment #2) at 9 mW injection power. It appears to resolve the FSR and at least three HOMs. Angular injection noise was found to cause large fluctuations in the measured signal power. This dominates the error bars shown below, but affects only the overall signal amplitude (not the peak frequency locations). The SQZ angular alignment loops should mitigate this issue at the sites.

Both data sets are attached.

This note reports analysis of cavity scans made by directly sweeping the AUX laser carrier frequency (no sidebands). The measurement is made by sweeping the RF offset of the AUX-PSL phase-locked loop and demodulating the cavity reflection/transmission signal at the offset frequency.

Y-Arm Scan

Due to the simplicity of its expected response, the Y-arm cavity was scanned first as a test of the AUX hardware and the sensitivity of the technique. Attachment 1 shows the measured cavity transmission with respect to RF drive signal.

The AUX laser launch setup is capable of injecting up to 9.3 mW into the AS port. This high-power measurement is shown by the black trace. The same measurement is repeated for a realistic SQZ injection power, 70 uW, indicated by the red curve. At low power, the technique still clearly resolves the FSR and six HOM resonances. From the identified mode resonance frequencies the following cavity parameters are directly extracted.

PRC Scan

An analogous scan was performed for the PRC, with the IFO locked on PSL carrier in PRMI. Attachment 2 shows the measurement of PRC transmission with respect to drive signal.

The scan resolves HOM resonances to at least ~13th order, whose frequencies yield the following cavity parameters.

SRC Scan

Ideally (and at the sites) the SRC mode resonances will be measured in SRMI configuration. Because every other cavity is misaligned, this configuration provides an easily-interpretable spectrum whose resonances can all be attributed to the SRC.

Due to time constraints at the 40m, the IFO could not be restored to lockability in SRMI. It has been more than two years since this configuration was last run. For this reason the scan was made instead with the IFO locked in DRMI, as shown in Attachment 3. The quantity measured is the AUX reflection with respect to drive signal.

This result requires far more interpretation because resonances of both the SRC and PRC are superposed. However, the resonances of the PRC are known a priori from the independent PRMI scan. The SRC mode resonances identified below do not conincide with any of the first five PRC mode resonances.

Based on the identified mode resonance frequencies, the SRC parameters are measured as follows.

Lessons Learned

From experience with the 40m, the main challenges to repeating this measurement at the sites will be the following.

• Pointing jitter of the input AUX beam. This causes the PSL-AUX beam overlap to vary at transmission (or reflection), causing variation in the amplitude of the AUX-PSL beat note. As far as we can tell, the frequency of the resonances (the only object of this measurement) is not changing in time, only the relative amplitudes of the diferent mode peaks. I believe the SQZ alignment loops will mitigate this problem at the sites.
• Stabilization of the network analyzer time base. We found the intrinsic frequency stability of the network analyzer (Agilent 4395A) to be unacceptably large. We solved this problem by phase-locking the Agilent to an external reference, a 10-MHz signal provided by an atomic clock.

I recently realized that the PLL is only using about 20% of the available actuation range of the AUX PZT. The +/-10 V control signal from the LB1005 is being directly inputted into the fast AUX PZT channel, which has an input range of +/-50 V.

I recommend to install a PZT driver (amplifier) between the controller and laser to use the full available actuator range. For cavity scans, this will increase the available sweep range from +/-50 MHz to +/-250MHz. This has a unique advantage even if slow temperature feedback is also implemented. To sample faster than the timescale of most of the angular noise,  scans generally need to be made with a total sweep time <1 sec. This is faster than the PLL offset can be offloaded via the slow temperature control, so the only way to scan more than 100 MHz in one measurement is with a larger dynamic range.

When I came in this morning no light was reaching the MC. One fast machine was dead, c1lsc, and a number of the slow machines: c1susaux, c1iool0, c1auxex, c1auxey, c1iscaux. Gautam walked me through reseting the slow machines manually and the fast machines via the reboot script. The computers are all back online and the MC is again able to lock.

I tried unsuccessfully to relock the MC this afternoon.

I came in to find it in a trouble state with a huge amount of noise on C1:PSL-FSS_PCDRIVE visible on the projector monitor. Light was reaching the MC but it was unable to lock.

• I checked the status of the fast machines on the CDS>FE STATUS page. All up.
• Then I checked the slow machine status. c1iscaux and c1psl were both down. I manually reset both machines. The large noise visible on C1:PSL-FSS_PCDRIVE disappeared.
• After the reset, light was no longer reaching the MC, which I take to mean the PMC was not locked. On the PSL>PMC page, I blanked the control signal, reenabled it, and attempted to relock by adjusting the servo gain as Gautam had showed me before. The PMC locks were unstable, with each one lasting only a second or so.
• Next I tried restoring the burt states for c1iscaux and c1psl from a snapshot taken earlier today, before the machine reboots. That did not solve the problem either.

I found c1lsc unresponsive again today. Following the procedure in elog #13935, I ran the rebootC1LSC.sh script to perform a soft reboot of c1lsc and restart the epics processes on c1lsc, c1sus, and c1ioo. It worked. I also manually restarted one unresponsive slow machine, c1aux.

After the restarts, the CDS overview page shows the first three models on c1lsc are online (image attached). The above elog references c1oaf having to be restarted manually, so I attempted to do that. I connect via ssh to c1lsc and ran the script startc1oaf. This failed as well, however.

In this state I was able to lock the MICH configuration, which is sufficient for my purposes for now, but I was not able to lock either of the arm cavities. Are some of the still-dead models necessary to lock in resonant configurations?

I freed ITMX and coarsely realigned the IFO using the OPLEVs. All the alignments were a bit off from overnight.

The IFO is still only able to lock in MICH mode currently, which was the situation before the earthquake. This morning I additionally tried restoring the burt state of the four machines that had been rebooted in the last week (c1iscaux, c1aux, c1psl, c1lsc) but that did not solve it.

Gautam and I restarted the models on c1lsc, c1ioo, and c1sus. The LSC system is functioning again. We found that only restarting c1lsc as Rolf had recommended did actually kill the models running on the other two machines. We simply reverted the rebootC1LSC.sh script to its previous form, since that does work. I'll keep using that as required until the ongoing investigations find the source of the problem.

This afternoon I started setting up the Supermicro 5017A-EP that will replace c1vac1/2. Following Johannes's procedure in 13681 I installed Debian 8.11 (jessie). There is a more recent stable release, 9.5, now available since the first acromag machine was assembled, but I stuck to version 8 for consistency. We already know that version to work. The setup is sitting on the left side of the electronics bench for now.

Today I finished setting up the server that will replace the c1vac1/2 machines. I put it on the martian network at the unassigned IP 192.168.113.72. I assigned it the hostname c1vac and added it to the DNS lookup tables on chiara.

I created a new targets directory on the network drive for the new machine: /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1vac. After setting EPICS environment environment variables according to 13681 and copying over (and modifiying) the files from /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1auxex as templates, I was able to start a modbusIOC server on the new machine. I was able to read and write (soft) channel values to the EPICS IOC from other machines on the martian network.

I scripted it as a systemd-managed process which automatically starts on boot and restarts after failure, just as it is set up on c1auxex.