Since we don't have an arm length precision measurement (i.e. better than centimeters), why not just do as Koji suggests and use the ALS to get the frequency spacing between a few red FSR and then we have the measurement solid ?

Arm lengths measured using ALS. Both the arms were estimated to have the same length (to the order of a centimeter) 37.51 m

How
I used ALS error signal to lock the arms and scanned the arm to find 4 consecutive IR resonances. From the beat note frequencies measured using the spectrum analyser during IR resonance, the FSR, and hence the length of the arms were calculated.

The estimated lengths are not very precise down to a mm given the resolution of the spectrum analyser. We have brought out the rubidium clock to use as reference for the spectrum analyser to challenge the measurements.

Koji was right, and I was using much too large of a CARM offset.  Tonight, I set either my CARM or DARM offset to 3 counts, and was able to easily acquire PRMI lock using REFL33. 

For either CARM or DARM offset reduction (the other one was kept at zero offset), I was able to get to about 0.5 counts, but I lose lock when I try to go to 0.4 or 0.3 counts.  One time, I tried "jumping over" the resonance, by going from minus 1 to plus 1 in CARM offset.  Plots of this below.

Locking notes

ALS locked with "Xarm" servo as proxy for DARM, and "Yarm" servo as proxy for DARM.  Pushing only on ETMs today, not the MC. 

MICH / PRCL:

Input matrix:  1's in REFL 33 I&Q, if not using power normalization.  200's in REFL 33 I&Q if power normalization used (either POPDC or POP22).  200 used because that's about the average value of POPDC or POP22 when PRMI sideband-only resonant.

Trigger:  POP22, up 100, down 10.

Power normalization:  1's for both MICH and PRCL in POP22I for one trial.  1's for both MICH and PRCL in POPDC for another trial.  Both seemed to work equally well, although that may change when I'm actually getting IR resonance in the cavity.

FM triggers:  MICH = FM2.  PRCL = FMs 2, 3, 6, 9.  Trigger up = 35, down 10.  PRCL delayed by 0.5 sec, MICH delayed by 5 seconds.

Servo gains:  MICH = 0.4, PRCL = -0.01

Observations:

When I approach the situation of both arms resonating, it pretty consistently looks like the PRM is getting pushed in pitch (and not in yaw).  I don't know why this could be, but it seems like this is the big symptom before lockloss - if the POP spot starts moving (and the PRM suspit signal starts moving), PRMI lock is going to be lost.

I don't know if it's imperfect alignment, imperfect mode matching, or something else, but I see lots of high-order higher order modes on both the POP and AS cameras when the CARM or DARM offset is less than 1 count.  I tried to take a video, but the brightness and contrast aren't set as high as on monitors 3 and 5, so it's hard to see the dim stuff.  Youtube.  At the midpoint of the video, you see a lockloss.

Even though I have overridden the transmission triggers so that I only use the QPDs for the transmission signals, I'm only seeing arm transmission values up to about 50 from each arm.  If we had ideal PRC gain, we expect something like 650 or 700. 

A few plots

All of the raw data for these plots, and several other channels, is in /users/jenne/PRFPMI/PRMI_2arms_8Apr2014/m1_to_p1_carmOffset_1081065069.  As mentioned above, "XARM" is CARM, and "YARM" is DARM.  So, the XARM_IN1 tells us about the CARM offset that I was applying.  The start time is 1081065069, and the plots are all 8 seconds long.

First, the transmitted power and the CARM offset.

The REFL_I error signals and the CARM offset.

The RF signals that we will eventually chose from for CARM and DARM control. Note that I'm not sure about the AS55 phase, so I plot both I and Q.

The PRM suspit and sus yaw angular signals and the CARM offset.  I don't see a huge change in the suspit signal, but it does seem to change character once we approach arm resonances.

I have taken EricQ's simulation results for the CARM plant change vs. CARM offset, and put that together with the CM and CARM digital control loops, to see what we have. 

The overall gains here aren't meaningful yet (I haven't set a UGF), but we can certainly look at the phases, and how the magnitude of the signals change with CARM offset.

First, the analog CM servo.  I use the servo shape from Den's elog from December, but only what he calls "BOOST", the regular servo shape, not any of the super boosts, "BOOST 1-3".   No normalization.

Next, the digital LSC CARM servo (same filters as XARM and YARM).  I have used FM4 and FM5, which are the 2 filters that we use to acquire regular LSC arm lock.  For the actuator, I just use a 1Hz pendulum as if I'm pushing only on the ETMs.

I also used the exact same setups as above, but normalized the transfer functions by a DC photodiode output.  The analog CM loops change the least (around a few kHz) if I use POPDC.  The digital CARM loops change the least (around 100Hz) if I use TRX (or, equivalently, TRX + TRY).

Here are the normalized plots:

Either way, with or without normalization, the digital CARM loop will go unstable between 0-10pm, for both the REFL RF photodiodes.  We need to figure out how to get a realistic transfer function out for the 1/sqrt(TRANS) signals, and see what happens with those.  If those also look unstable, then maybe we should consider a DC signal for the analog CM servo to start, since that could have a wider linear range.

[Jenne, EricQ]

This evening we took things a little bit farther than last night (elog 9791) and transitioned CARM to fully IR signals, no ALS at all for CARM error signals!  We were unsuccessful at doing the same for DARM. 

As we discussed at 40m Meeting this afternoon, the big key was to remove the PRCL ASC from the situation.  I don't know specifically yet if it's QPD saturation, or what, that was causing PRM to be pushed in pitch last night, but removing the ASC loops and reengaging the PRM optical lever worked like a dream. 

Since we can now, using ALS-only, get arbitrarily close to the PRMI+2 arm full resonance point, we decided to transition CARM over to the 1/sqrt(transmission) signals.  We have now done this transition 5 or 10 times.  It feels very procedural and robust now, which is awesome!

To make this transition easier, we made a proto-CESAR for the CARM signals in the LSC.  There's nothing automatic about it, it's just (for now) a different matrix. 

ALS lock conventions:

We have (finally listening to the suggestion that Koji has been making for years now....) set a convention for which side of the PSL the X and Y beatnotes should be, so that we don't have to guess-and-check the gain signs anymore.

For the X beatnote, when you increase the value on the slow slider, the beatnote should increase in frequency.  For the Y beatnote, when you increase the value on the slow slider, the beatnote should decrease in frequency. 

The input matrix (the aux input part) should then have +1 from ALSX->carm, and +1 from ALSY->carm.  It should also have -1 from ALSX->darm and +1 from ALSY->darm. 

The output matrix should be carm -> +1's for both ETMs.  darm should be -1 to ETMX and +1 to ETMY.

With these conventions, both carm and darm should have negative signs for their gains. 

Since we don't have (although should whip up) Watch scripts for the CARM and DARM servo filters, we were using the Xarm filterbank for carm, and the Yarm filterbank for darm again.

Transitioning CARM to 1/sqrt(trans) signals:

As with last night, we were able to easily acquire PRMI lock with a CARM offset of 3 counts.  We then moved down to 2 counts, and saw transmission values of 0.1-0.2.  We set the offsets in the TR_SQRTINV filter banks so that the difference between the outputs was zero, and the mean of the outputs was 2 (the same as the CARM offset we had). 

We looked at the relative gain and sign between the ALS and 1/sqrt() signals, and found that we needed a minus sign, and half the gain.  So, we stepped the 1/sqrt() matrix elements from 0 to -0.5 in steps of 0.1, and at the same time were stepping the ALS matrix elements to CARM from +1 to 0, in steps of 0.2.  This was, excitingly, very easy!

The first time we did this successfully, was a few seconds before 1081143556 gps.

Here is a set of spectra from the first time we locked on the 1/sqrt(trans) signals. 

Failure to transition CARM to RF signals, or reduce CARM offset to zero:

While locked on the 1/sqrt(trans) signals, we looked at several RF signals as options for CARM.  The most promising seems to be REFL55, normalized by (TRX+TRY).  The next most promising looks like REFL11 normalized by POPDC.  Note that these are entirely empirical, and we aren't yet at the resonant point, so these may not be truly the best.  Anyhow, we need to reconfigure the LSC input of the normalized error signals, so that they can go into the CESAR matrices.  This was more than we were prepared to do during the nighttime.  However, it seems like we should be about ready to do the transition, once we have the software in place.  Right now, we either normalize both ALS and the RF signal, or we normalize neither.  We want to be able to apply normalization to only the RF signal. 

Just sitting on the tail of the CARM resonance, there were some random times when we seem to have swung through total resonance, and spoiled our 1/sqrt(trans) signals, which aren't valid at resonance, and so we lost lock.  This implies that auto-transitioning, as CESAR should do, will be helpful. 

Attempt at transitioning DARM to AS55:

Next up, we tried to transition DARM to AS55, after we had CARM on the 1/sqrt signals.  This was unsuccessful.  Part of the reason is that it's unclear what the relative gain should be between the ALS darm signals and AS55, since the transfer function is not flat.  Also, we didn't have much coherence between the ALS signals and AS55Q at low frequencies, below about 100 Hz, which is concerning.  Anyhow, more to investigate and think on here. 

Transitioning CARM to 1/sqrt signals, with a DARM offset:

As a last test, Q put in a DARM offset in the ALS control, rather than a CARM offset, and then was still able to transition CARM control to the 1/sqrt signals.  As we expect, when we're sitting on opposite sides of the arm resonances, the 1/sqrt signals have opposite signs, to make a CARM signal. 

Conclusions / path(s) forward:

We need to redo the LSC RF signal normalization, so that the normalized signals can be inputs to CESAR. 

We need to make sure we set the AS55 phase in a sane way.

We need to think about the non-flat transfer function (the shape was 1/f^n, where n was some number other than 0) between the ALS darm signal and AS55.  The shape was the same for AS55 I&Q, and didn't change when we changed the AS55 phase, so it's not just a phasing problem. 

What DC signals can we use for auto-transitioning between error signals for the big CARM CESAR?

[EricQ, Jenne]

We're still working, but I'm really excited, so here's our news:  We are currently holding the IFO on all IR signals.  No green, no ALS is being used at all!!!!  

PRCL and MICH in REFL33, CARM on 1/sqrt(trans), DARM on AS55 Q.

CARM actuating on MC2, DARM actuating +ETMY, -ETMX. 

CARM offset is 1.9 counts, TRX averages about .1 counts. At this offset, we are able to transition CARM from ALS to DC Transmission signals and DARM from ALS to AS55Q. 

[EricQ, Jenne]

A few more details on our work for the evening, of switching the PRFPMI completely to IR signals (although still with a pretty big CARM offset).

We did the same transition for CARM to 1/sqrt(trans) signals, as last night (elog 9793).  The only difference is that for CARM actuation, we were using a -1*MC in the output matrix, rather than +1's for both ETMs. 

We then had a look at the relative sign and gain between the ALS DARM signals, and AS55Q, using a calibration line in DARM.  Before doing so, we used the DARM line (521.3 Hz, 50 counts) to rotate the AS 55 phase from -60.7 degrees to -97.7 degrees, which gave us about 20dB separation between the I and Q signals.  This informed us that we needed a factor of about 400 less gain for AS55Q than for the ALS darm signal, as well as a minus sign, so I put -400 in the DC normalization place in the LSC for AS55, so that my input matrix would go from ALSY-ALSX (1's) to +1 in AS55Q. 

This transition to AS55 was very easy, and once we did it, we held lock for 5 or 10 minutes, until a large earthquake from Papa New Guinea hit us.  Note however, that we still had a large CARM offset, and our TRX and TRY signals were about 0.1 counts, when we expect several hundred at perfect resonance. 

After that, we relocked, made both CARM and DARM transitions again, and tried to look at a CARM calibration line to see if we see CARM information in any of the REFL RF signals.  We lost lock after a few minutes (so, not related to our calibration line), so we didn't finish, but it looks like REFL55I, normalized by TRX+TRY is the most promising.  Also, REFL55's phase was already very good, while REFL11's phase was not. 

There were some moderate changes to the LSC model that happened, and matching screen changes.  I put in a switch just before the input triggering place of the CARM servo.  This allows us to switch from the "regular" input matrix, and a CESAR signal.  The inputs to the CESAR block are sqrtinv(TRX), sqrtinv(TRY), ALSX, ALSY and the output of the CARM row of the input matrix (so that we can have dynamic normalization of the RF signals).  I have exposed all of these changes in the input matrix screens.

I also modified slightly the ALS watch scripts, to include CARM and DARM servo filter watching, so now we can use the actual CARM and DARM servos.  We should make restore configure scripts for these!

The 2 gps times for when we made the transition from ALS DARM to AS55 DARM were 1081238160 and 1081240217.  We want to go back tomorrow, and extract some nice time series.

Here's a spectrum though, of the difference in noise between DARM on ALS, and DARM on AS55.  The CARM was always on 1/sqrt(Trans) signals during these spectra.  We have an enormous gain in high frequency noise performance once we switch to the RF signal, which is great.

 Phenomenal!!  Well done, guys!

 A few time series from last night's data. 

300 seconds, starting from 1081240100, showing that as we move from ALSY-ALSX to AS55Q, the DARM error signal gets smaller.

The same 300 seconds, showing that the CARM error signal, and the arm transmissions, are not perturbed during this transition.

DARM in and out, for 300 seconds, showing that the control output also gets smaller.

A slightly longer time series, ending at about the same time, but starting a few minutes earlier, showing us (1) adding a 3 count CARM offset, (2) locking the PRMI (3) transitioning CARM to sqrtinv signals, and then (4) transitioning DARM to AS55Q.

CARM and DARM in and outs, for the 500 second time chunk showing all the transitions.  Unfortunately, it looks like CARM_OUT is more noisy when it's on the sqrtinv signals, than it was on the ALS signals.  Part of this may be that we have not yet swapped the resistor in the TRY QPD, to improve the SNR in the same way that we have already done for the TRX QPD.  [EDIT, JCD:  Also, we had hard-triggered the Trans switching, so we were only looking at the QPD sum for the TRX and TRY, and the QPDs only have a few ADC counts at low transmissions, so we had poor SNR for that reason too.]

About the ADC range,

According to the elogs, DARM = AS55Q/400. So in the current level, the error has +/-40cntpp (even if I ignore the whitening).

The arm transmission this time was 0.1-0.3. This will go up to 100~300. So we potentially increase the AS55Q optical gain by factor of 1000.

So we get +/-40000. This is already too much. If we consider the whitening, the situation is more tough.

We need to lower the whitening gain. If it is not enough, we need to lower the power on the PD.

How much was the whitening gain for AS55 this time?

 21 dB. We played with the whitening gain a little bit; at around 30dB with the signal levels at TRX = .1ish, we were consistently saturating the ADC. 

It's just one of the stepping stones, but not yet a mile stone.
Keep going forward!

Arm lengths were measured using ALS

X arm length = 37.79 +/- 0.05 m

Y arm length = 37.81 +/- 0.01 m

Whats and whys

We want to measure the arm length with an accuracy of say a mm.

This would mean a measurement precision of 1e-3/40=25ppm. (1mm in 40m)

So the required measurement resolution on the spectrum analyser is 25ppm*4MHz=100Hz (assuming the cavity FSR is roughly 4MHz). 

Although the spectrum analyser does not limit the measurement precision, we are limited by the noise in ALS at 1000Hz rms. So we can use ALS only to measure arm length precise to the order of a few mm.

RXA: Not that we really need to right now, but even with an ALS noise of 1000 Hz, we can can do better just by averaging at each resonance point. And fitting a line as you have already done gets even better:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propagation_of_uncertainty

The Spectrum analyser was reference locked to the rubidium clock @10MHz for these measurements.

The FSRs of the arms

X arm = 3.9671e+06 +/- 4.8535e+03 Hz

Y arm = 3.9648e+06 +/- 1.1064e+03 Hz

Attachments:

1&2. Plots representing the arm scans showing the beat frequency for which IR resonates in the arm vs the ALS offset (position of the ETM).

3. Data and code (zip file)

P.S. We had trouble scanning the arms using ALS. This was because the slow servo was not enabled. Hence ALS was losing its PDH lock everytime we scanned past a couple of FSRs.

That's a very smooth DARM transition - its good news that the dALS signals don't have a huge offset w.r.t the real error signal.

It would be interesting to see if the MICH can be locked and stay locked which CARM is ramped in. We would want to hold it with the Q phase of the CARM PD once its on.

May not be a milestone, but its cool anyway. 

+2 points.

Will also be cool to see how soon the CM servo can be switched on in the acquisition sequence. Maybe ALS_COMM -> CM board, gets mixed with TRXY for low frequencies in the intermediate stage before final RF?

I'm not sure why, but the WFS were turned off when I came in this morning.  The MC was not staying locked, and even during brief locks, the FSS FAST out was railed at 10. 

Aligning the MC mirrors to maximize the transmission, and then engaging the WFS seems to have made things better.

I have compressed the IFO Configure screen.  All PRMI things (sideband lock and carrier lock) are in the PRMI button, all arm things (both RF and ALS) are in the respective arm buttons.

I have also made a new set of scripts for CARM and DARM lock acquisition with ALS. 

I hope that each button's purpose is clear, but take a second to look at them before you next use the IFO Configure screen.

This afternoon, I was toying around with reducing either the CARM or DARM offsets (so, put in a CARM offset, leave DARM zero, lock the PRMI, then reduce CARM offset to zero.  Or, put in a DARM offset, leaving CARM offset zero, lock the PRMI, then reduce the DARM offset to zero).

When looking at the data, I see that the MICH error signal gets fuzzier when the arms get close to resonance. (Note here that because I forgot to zero the carm offset before finding the resonances, -3 is my zero point for this plot and the next.)

Here is a zoom of the last piece of this time series, but with both TRX and TRY plotted (along with POPDC, CARM_ERR and DARM_ERR), where you can see that I had a momentary power buildup of > 100 transmission counts, which is about 20% of our final expected power.

Here is a different time series, showing a reduction of the DARM offset, and you can see that as the offset approaches zero, the MICH error signal gets noticeably more fuzzy.  Somewhere near the 240 second mark, I lose PRMI lock.

[Jenne, EricQ]

I told Koji that I wanted to play with the common mode servo this evening, and he pointed out that we only get the signals after the digital demod phase angle in the digital system (obviously).  So, if I want to use either REFL11 or REFL55 for my CARM signal, I want to do something in analog-land so that my digital demod phase is close to 0 or 90. 

While we had the PRFPMI locked (with CARM offset of 2 or 3 nm), we set the demod phases of REFL11 and REFL55 to minimize a CARM line in the Q-phase.  This gave us -34 degrees for REFL11, and -75 degrees for REFL55. 

We calculated that about 1 degree of phase shift is about 1/(2 * pi * freq), or about 1.4e-8 seconds of delay for 11MHz.  We took the speed of light in the cables to be about 2/3*c, so 1.4e-8 * 2e8 = 2.9 meters per degree for 11MHz.  Since REFL11 was 34 degrees from 0, we estimate that we need to add about 98 meters of cable to the REFL11 signal path.  The same calculation for 55 MHz, but with a 15 degree shift required, gives 8.8 meters of cable to be added to the REFL55 signal path. 

I connected up some long BNC cables, and inserted them between the heliax breakout board on the LSC rack, and the respective PD inputs of the REFL11 and REFL55 demod boards.  I used (45 meters + 45 meters + a little bit) for REFL11, and used about 9 meters for REFL55. 

When we relocked the PRFPMI, and redid the phasing, we were very close to zero for both REFL11 and REFL55!  REFL11's digital demod phase is now +1 degree, and REFL55's digital demod phase is -5 degrees.

We changed the input of the CM servo board from POY (which Den and Koji had been using in December - see elog 9500) to REFL11 I MON. 

Q locked the FPMI (separate reply elog), and then we tried engaging the CM analog servo.  We were not successful. 

These settings were mostly copied from elog 9500, so they are almost surely not correct. 

CM servo screen:  In1 gain = 31dB, switch on, offset = -2.7V, boost off, super boosts off, option=disable, 79:1.6k switch disabled, polarity minus, option disable, AO gain=8dB, limiter enable.

For the slow path, CM_SLOW -> MC LSC servo had a +1 in the input matrix. 

CM filters in the AUX_ERR screen:  FM1 (unwhite) on, all others off, gain = 2.6. 

MC servo filters:  FM7, FM10 on, all others off (no triggered filter modules).  Gain = 0 initially.

MC servo board AO path disabled initially, G=-32dB initially.

Once Q had the FPMI locked, I tried increasing just the CM analog gain (by enabling the AO path on the MC board, and increasing the gain).  Doing this, I lost lock at -3 dB. 

I then tried again, this time alternating increasing the analog gain, and increasing the MC LSC servo gain.  I got up to 3e-3 for the MC digital gain, and -7 dB for the analog gain before we lost lock again.

We have determined that we should probably try just locking one of the arms with POX or POY, as Den and Koji did, to get a feel for how the system works.

For future reference:

As we were poking around with the common mode servo in an FPMI configuration, we locked CARM/DARM with ALS as in recent ELOGs.

MICH was locked on ASDC: ASDC -> MICH = 10.0 in the DCPD DoF Matrix (I couldn't easily get AS55Q working, ASDC worked quickly and good enough)

MICH gain +25, FM4 FM5 On, FM2 switched on once locked. Offset was manually adjusted to get closer to dark fringe.

Actuated on BS: MICH->BS = 0.5 in Output Matrix.

I have never used such a long cable for RF phase adjustment. The speed of the signal is 2e8 m/s and the frequency is ~10e6 Hz.
This means that the wavelength is only about 20m. How could you end up with ~100meters?
The convenient way to remember the cable delay is "1m, 1MHz, 2deg". This gives us ~1.5m for 11MHz and 34deg.

In fact, 1 degree of phase shift is not 1/(2 pi freq) second of delay, but f/360.

For such a precise phase adjustment, it is better to calibrate the delay with the network analyzer.

I guess this is normal. DARM has (almost) the same effect of MICH on the corner interferometer signals, just increased in amplitude by the arm cavity amplification. When the arm is out of resonance, DARM is almost completely depressed and it is not affecting MICH at all. On the other hand, when the cavities are exactly at resonance, DARM signal is amplified w.r.t. MICH by the cavity gain (2F/pi).

Since DARM is still controlled with ALS, it is probably noisy. The closer to resonance you move the cavities, the more ALS noise in DARM will affect MICH.

[Jenne, EricQ]

This evening, as part of locking activities, we threw together some handy scripts.

The first one, "Lock_ALS_CARM_and_DARM.py" (no judging of my naming style!!), lives in .../scripts/ALS/ . 

It acquires ALS lock in CARM and DARM mode, so we don't have to do it by hand anymore.

The first thing that it does is ask you to acknowledge that your beatnotes are in place, and they follow our new (newer than the last elog about conventions) beatnote convention.  You are reminded in the terminal window what that convention is:  When the temperature sliders for either arm is INCREASED, the beatnote frequency should INCREASE. 

After you acknowledge that the beatnotes are good, it sets the CARM and DARM servo gains to zero, enables the outputs, sets the input matrix elements, clears the phase tracker histories, and starts ramping up the gains (with +1,+1 for DARM, the darm servo gain is +positive.  with -1*ALSX,+1*ALSY for CARM, the carm servo gain is -negative).  At a gain of 3, it engages the integrators and the resonant gains.  At the final gain of 6, it engages the boosts.

We have used this script ~10 times tonight, and it's been great every time.

The next two scripts are for making the transition from ALS to IR signals.  They both live in ..../scripts/PRFPMI/

"Transition_CARM_ALS_to_TransSqrtInv.py" (again - no judging!) slowly blends the input matrix elements to swap CARM control from the ALS signals to the 1/sqrt(trans) signals.  It takes a few steps, and asks for a keyboard input between steps.  This is because if our 1/sqrt(trans) offsets aren't perfect, we can start to lose transmission power.  To mitigate this, we decrease the offset in the CARM servo filter bank to get more power back.  This script requires an input, which is what you want the final sqrtinv matrix elements to be.  It will fail without this.  For a CARM offset, both of the final sqrtinv matrix elements will have the same sign.

"Transition_DARM_ALS_to_AS55.py" (I can telepathically hear you judging me right now.)  does the same blending, except to swap DARM control from ALS signals to AS55Q.  For the same reason of imperfect offset-setting, it takes several steps, to allow you to adjust the CARM offset if needed. Although, after typing this, I realized that perhaps we should have been tweaking the DARM offset.  Either way, this transition required much less tweaking of offsets than the CARM transition did.  Again, the script requires an input, which is your final desired AS55Q->DARM matrix element value.

*  Both of these scripts should be run at a digital CARM offset of about 2 counts, although with the offset tweaking during the CARM transition, I usually end at about 1.5 counts. 

*  To determine the final gain value for the CARM sqrtinv matrix elements, we have been using a spare filter bank (ex. XARM), and having the input to that be the sum of the sqrtinv channels.  We then put in a CARM line, and look at the transfer function between the temporary filter bank's input, and the CARM_IN1. 

*  To determine the final gain value for the DARM AS55 matrix element, we have been doing a similar thing, looking at the transfer function between DARM_IN1 and AS55Q with a DARM line on.  We have been putting this DC gain into the static PD normalization (4th block from the left on the big LSC screen), although with the new script, it will be easier to just put that value into the matrix element.

[Jenne, EricQ]

Tonight, we transitioned CARM and DARM to IR signals, took loop transfer functions, and determined that we could engage the LSC boosts (FM4 in the CARM and DARM servos, which are the same as the XARM and YARM servos). 

Q is preparing spectra to post, and I will dig out time series.  Look for these tomorrow, if they aren't posted tonight.

For the time series data fetching, I have taken notes on what we were doing when, so that I can actually find the data.

11:09pm:  CARM's LSC boost on for the first time

11:14pm:  DARM transferred to AS55Q

11:21pm:  DARM's LSC boost on for the first time

(lockloss)

11:53pm:  CARM transition

12:02am:  DARM transition done, both LSC boosts on

12:04am:  lockloss after reducing CARM digital offset to 0.4

12:45am: PRMI + 2 arms flashing, with no CARM or DARM offsets (arms still on ALS) because we forgot to put in the CARM offset before restoring PRM alignment.  PRMI may have been actually locked, or we may just have been flashing....need to look through the data to see what our recycling looked like.

(lockloss)

1:05am:  pretty smooth transition completed (both CARM and DARM), but we lost lock while reducing the CARM offset.

1:19am: lockloss - why?? We were just sitting at a CARM offset of about 1.3nm (1.3 counts), holding on IR signals.  We were not touching any IFO things while looking at some plots, and just lost lock.  Want to see if we can understand why.

1:27am:  another nice smooth transition for both CARM and DARM to IR signals, but almost immediate lockloss when reducing the CARM offset.

Using the new ALS lock acquisition scripts (elog 9816) and our transition scripts, getting back to PRFPMI lock is pretty smooth and procedural.

* Align arms using ASS (ifo configure screen, restore xarm and yarm, run both arms' ass scripts).

* Align PRMI, no arms (ifo configure screen, restore prmi sideband)

* Find ALS beatnotes, with arm lasers on opposite sides of the PSL.  For both, when increasing the value of the temperature slider, the beatnote should increase in frequency.  (ifo configure screen, restore CARM and DARM als)

* Run ...../scripts/ALS/Lock_ALS_CARM_and_DARM.py

* Run "Find resonance" scripts from ALS screen for each arm.

* Put in a 3 count offset to CARM loop.

* Restore PRM alignment.  (PRMI should acquire lock immediately, although PRM may need some small alignment tweaking).  Enable PRCL and MICH outputs, PRM and BS actuation outputs.

* Reduce CARM offset to 2 counts. 

* Set offsets of 1/sqrt(TRX) and 1/sqrt(TRY) filter banks in the AUXERR section of the LSC screen.  The outputs of both should equal 2 counts (to match the 2 count offset in the CARM loop). 

* Run .../scripts/PRFPMI/Transition_CARM_ALS_to_TransSqrtInv.py , making sure to reduce the CARM digital offset if needed, to keep the arm transmissions at about 0.1 counts.

* Engage FM4 of the CARM filter bank, which is the LSC boost.

* Run .../scripts/PRFPMI/Transition_DARM_ALS_to_AS55.py , making sure to reduce the CARM (or should be DARM?) digital offset if needed, to keep the arm transmissions at about 0.1 counts.

* Engage FM4 of the DARM filter bank, which is the LSC boost.

Notes for going forward:

When we have small-ish digital CARM offsets, such that both of our arm transmitted powers are about 0.1 or higher, we see clear coherence between our CARM_IN1 (the 1/sqrt(trans) signals) and a normalized REFL11_I (again using a spare filter bank like XARM to get REFL11 normalized by (TRX+TRY) ).  We have not yet tried transitioning the CARM digital error signal to this normalized REFL11.

Even though we see that the IFO is much less noisy (as measured by significantly reduced RIN in TRX and TRY as visible by eye on Dataveiwer), we are still losing lock when we reduce the CARM offset.  I have noted above several times, for when we had locklosses, so that I can see if I see anything elucidating in the time series data.

 As Jenne mentioned, we took OLTF transfer functions, and determined that we had more than enough phase margin to switch on the LSC boosts in FM4. This improved the error signal noise spectra quite a lot, and noticeably reduced the TRX/TRY fluctuations, and actuation output. 

Here's the CARM OLTF (FM4 boost on in red, boost off in black)

Here's what happened to the CARM and DARM spectra when we turned on the boosts. (ALS only in black, initial IR signal transitions in mid-color, boosted IR signals in bright color)

I looked at 2 of the locklosses from last night, (1:19am and 1:27am), and saw that for both, the DARM loop started to oscillate just before we lost lock.  In the trials tonight, we were more watchful of gain peaking.

Here is the 1:19am lockloss

And here is the 1:27am lockloss

 So you can see what we were doing, and what the effect was, here is a few minutes of data just before the 1:27am lockloss. The times I note below are rough, but should give you an idea of what happened at which time.

0 sec:  Arms are held on resonance with ALS.

10 sec:  CARM offset of 3nm added.

20 sec:  PRM restored, one flash, then PRMI acquires lock.

30 sec:  CARM offset reduced to 2nm, transmitted powers are about 0.1

50 sec:  Transition CARM to 1/sqrt(trans) signals.  Note that we are using the high gain Thorlabs PD here, so the noise is better than last Thursday.

60-110 sec:  CARM offset reduction to about 1nm.

110 sec:  CARM's LSC low frequency boost engaged.

120 sec:  DARM transitioned to AS55Q.

170 sec:  DARM's LSC low frequency boost engaged.

Last night, EricQ and I were concerned that we might need some CARM UGF servoing, so I added a UGF servo block, copied from the aLIGO LSC model, to our LSC model.  The block is inline with the CARM servo, after the output triggering, just before the output matrix.  Q put together some screens, which are accessible from the main LSC screen. 

The model is compiled and running.  We didn't get very far in testing it though before Koji pointed out that it is a slow solution, and not a fast one like we were searching for.  We were hoping to deal with the momentary power buildup, and thus optical gain change, as the arms flash close to resonance.  The UGF servo will not work nearly that fast though.  We may want it for slow UGF servo-ing, but it's not the solution to what Q and I were thinking about yesterday.  Regular ol' dynamic normalization is closer to the right answer for this.

In tonight's activities, Koji and I found that we probably want a CESAR block for DARM as well as CARM, so that we can independently normalize AS55Q. 

To solve the DARM oscillation issue from last night (that I discovered this evening when I finally looked at the time series data), we may want to implement a DARM UGF servo.  For tonight, as we reduced the CARM offset and started seeing gain peaking in the DARM spectra, I hand-reduced the DARM gain.

[Jenne, Koji]

This evening, Koji and I followed the procedure from last night (elog 9817), with the exceptions that as we saw gain peaking in the DARM spectrum, we lowered the DARM servo gain.  We also left the DARM FM4 boost off, and added (TRX+TRY) power normalization to AS55 (although we still had to hand-reduce the gain).    These changes enabled us to reduce the CARM offset much further.  We were able to get the transmitted powers to hold steady at about 1 count while on the IR signals, which is a new record for us.  (We had in the past held the arms with ALS at several counts, but the power fluctuations were huge, and now they are nice and small).

After that, we started looking at whether we could transition CARM over to REFL11I.  We tried a few times, but never made it all the way.

Here are some times for data-foraging tomorrow:

8:27pm, nice transition, CARM offset reduction to 0.6 before lockloss.

9:19pm, turned on power normalization for AS55Q, then reduced CARM offset to 0.5

9:40pm, Lockloss after reducing CARM offset to -0.24, arm transmitted powers around 0.9.

gps 1081748419: First trial trying to transition CARM to REFL11I normalized by (TRX+TRY).

gps 1081749965:  Tried to transition CARM to (REFL11 + REFL33)/(TRX+TRY).  Got about 1/3 of the way through the transition (in terms of matrix element value steps) before lockloss.

11:56pm, Tried to add in REFL11I to CARM error signal (without reducing 1/sqrt(trans) matrix elements).  We increased the REFL11 matrix element until we saw gain peaking, and then tried reducing the 1/sqrt(trans) contribution, and lost lock.  We were only at an offset of 0.3, so we probably weren't close enough to the resonance yet.  We were able to add in REFL11 information, but this was probably not too hard, since there wasn't much actual information in it.

Thoughts:

* It's a little weird that once we are on IR signals, the 0 CARM offset point that we find with ALS is not the true CARM offset point.  Although, this may be because we're just going to an averaged no CARM offset place with ALS, but since ALS is noisy, we won't ever really be holding on the zero offset point.  Anyhow, when we were using the 1/sqrt(trans) signals for CARM, and the CARM digital offset was -0.24, the ALSX and ALSY outputs were both about 0.5 in magnitude.

* We're getting there! 

Jenne made some suggestions for some plots that would be useful on our CARM offset reduction adventures, so I made some with my MIST model. 

First, here's a plot showing the transfer function of CARM to TRX, with logarithmically spaced offsets out to 3nm. While not a control signal, it shows us where the optical plant resonance stuff is happening. The peaks in this TF correspond to peaks in REFL11, REFL55, AS11, etc., as in the close-to-resonance TFs in ELOG 9785. 

[more to come, had a MATLAB issue]

Some time series data from Wednesday night. 

Here is the first time we've gotten the arm transmissions to about 1 count, while holding CARM and DARM on IR signals, so the transmission, as well as POPDC, were relatively quiet.

As we were attempting to transition CARM to REFL11I, at least 2 of the times, we were hitting a CARM oscillation:

Last night, as well as tonight, the ALS seems not quite as robust as it was earlier in the week.

I have just taken noise spectra, and ALS is definitely more noisy than usual. 

These plots are with the arms held in CARM and DARM mode, with servo gains of 8. I was seeing the beginnings of gain peaking at a gain of 10, so I turned it back to 8.  Our ALS in-loop RMS is usually something like a few hundred Hz, but I'm seeing over 1kHz, so I have a factor of 4 or 5 too much noise.  Why?!?!?

I have noticed that ALS noise has been at 1KHz rms since LSC arm lock servos have been used to lock arms using ALS error signals. May be this has not been given much attention.

But looking more closely at the ALS noise (better dtt resolution for noise power spectrum) , there seems to be too much noise suppression at <1Hz and not much happening at around 10Hz.

Attachment 1 (data files at /users/manasa/data/140421/)

So I made a bunch of transfer function measurements for ALS and phase tracker servo. Koji will be using these and redesigning the servo filters so that we can get more suppression at 10Hz.

Other than this I also found that the Y arm showed more high frequency noise as compared to the X arm. (Edit by manasa: Thinking back now, this could be related to the onset of 60Hz noise at the Y end elog 9838. But still has to be looked at after fixing TRY)

Attachment 2

Tip: Once the arms are ALS locked, enabling the SLOW_SERVO helps hold the lock stably. 

P.S. I realigned the Y green to the arm and brought GTRY to 0.93

To do:

Find out what makes Y arm in-loop noise at high frequency higher than X arm.

This evening, I was not able to successfully transition CARM from ALS to 1/sqrt(trans) signals.  The TRY time series looked odd, so I took a spectra, and we have huge 60Hz noise in TRY. 

I found a lock stretch from around 6:30pm that did not show the 60Hz noise, and then there was a lock stretch around 8pm that did have the noise.  So, something happened at the Yend between 6:30 and 8pm tonight.

Asking around, this was the time frame in which Manasa was down at the Yend to realign the green beam, and to check cabling for the PZT_OUT and ERR_MON signals to the ADC.

Looking at the spectra, Rana noted that we have even as well as odd harmonics of the 60Hz line, which is unusual.

To try to diagnose the problem, Rana and I tried to make sure no cables' connectors were touching, and that no equipment was plugged in that shouldn't be.  We noticed that none of: the shutter, the Thorlabs TRY PD, or the QPD TRY are isolated from the table.  To see if perhaps the shutter was the problem, I turned off the power to the Yend green shutter, and unplugged the cable.  The cable is laying on the table, with the connector sitting on a piece of plastic to isolate it.  Removing the shutter from the system did not change anything. 

We don't see the 60Hz noise in the Xarm, so it's not on the laser light itself.  Also, we don't see the 60Hz lines in the Yarm feedback signal, so we're not putting the lines onto the mirror, and thus onto the Yarm's light. 

Manasa, can you please take a look, and see if you can figure out what is going on?  We need TRY so that we can transition to 1/sqrt(trans) signals for CARM.  Thanks!!

In an effort to familiarize myself with the analog CM servo, I've begun to replicate Koji and Den's work from the ELOG post that this is a reply to.

I hooked POX11Q into the IN1 of the CM board. (POX is rotated by ~86 degrees in the CDS, meaning analog Q is almost perfect.)

While there, I took out the too-long delay cables Jenne introduced for REFLs 11 and 55. (Also note: when we do cable-based analog phasing in the future, we should do it on the LO side, instead of the PD input side.) I also heard a dangerously crinkly sound from the short SMA cable for REFL11, so I replaced it with a beefy looking new one I found on the SP table.

I messed with the gain and offset in the CM_SLOW input filter to get it to look just like POX11_I_ERR, and was able to lock the arm on it without an issue. I then put the SR560 between the CM and MC (30k pole, but also AC coupled, because I figure the digital loop should be doing the work down there, and don't want to kick the AO with an offset), and was able to turn on the AO path with a gain of 8dB on the CM board and 10dB on the MC board, as detailed in Koji's procedures.

I wasn't able to increase the AO gain to 9dB without breaking lock, but maybe this is ok, because by judging by the LSC filter gains, POX11 might be about 3 times bigger than POY, so maybe 8dB AO gain on POX ~ =18dB AO gain on POY? I was able to put the CM servo offset at 0, but turning on boosts promptly kicked the MC out of lock.

I'm stopping for the night; but tomorrow I'll bust out a spectrum analyzer to see if I actually have won some bandwidth with the CM servo, and check out the situation with the offsets and boosts.

 I went to the Y end to look at the TRY 60Hz noise situation this morning. While looking at TRY noise on dtt, I found that just lifting the cable away from the cable bunch that runs out of the table suppressed the noise drastically. 

Attachment 1

I removed the unwanted bnc connector in the path of the already long TRY cable running from the PD to the 1Y4 rack and isolated it from the bunch. TRY became less noisy.

But the noise was back again earlier in the evening and it looks like the noise is very much related to the TRY cable. TRY cable might have moved from its sweet spot while I was around checking cable connections yesterday.

I couldn't find a spare to replace it right away today (We need a BNC to 4 pin lemo).

 The detectors and electronics on this table are not properly isolated. To reduce the 60 Hz and ground loops, photodiodes and shutter must be isolated by using plastic spacers as we usually do elsewhere - this table just seems to have a few oversights.

Steve can start assembling all of the pieces to do this in the morning and then we can start the swapping after the meeting.

The high gain Transmon cable should be a regular BNC. There's no need for 4-pin LEMO in this usage, so the best move is to modify the board and replace the 4-pin LEMO connector with an isolated panel mount BNC female.

The AC adapter for this diode (and all of the detectors on the table) should get their power from a power strip which gets plugged into the rack with the whitening boards. The SHG oven, the Uniblitz shutter, and any cameras can get their power from another power strip if needed/wanted.

[Steve, Manasa]

To find noise source

1. Swapped the power cable of the PD and checked that it is connected to the right power source.

2. Changed the aluminium base of the post holding the diode so that the diode is floating

3. Grounded the table and the rack

4. Routed the cable on the other side of the beam tube to isolate it from other cables.

After all the above, we still found that shaking the cable was making TRY noisy.

I pulled out the PD whitening board to replace the 4 pin lemo connector with a bnc connector so that we can swap the cable with a new one. So there is no TRY right now.

The MON outputs of the Y end QPD whitening board were hot earlier today while pulling it out of the crate. After swapping the 4 pin lemo connector with an isolated panel mount bnc connector, I stuck the board back into the crate and this immediately kicked the ETMY suspension. Jenne and I went to the Y end to look at what was going on. We removed the board from the crate after smelling something burning. The MON output ports of the whitening board were super hot this time. There is no sign of any components melting on the board (comparing the board with its pictures that were taken earlier) and a tester board stuck into the crate lights up just fine.

So the back panel is still ok. We need to troubleshoot or replace the whitening board.

Edit, JCD:  The attached photos are from right after I replaced the "Rgain" resistor, elog 9823.  What they show is that it looks like some of the melting / burning may have already been happening before I pulled the board, and I just never noticed :(  In particular, look at the resistors on the main board above the blue "G" sticker.  There isn't a difference that I can tell between this photo from last week, and today's situation. 

 I re-plugged in the Yend shutter, and turned it on.

I tried some locking anyway tonight, even though we don't have TRY. 

The biggest conclusion is that I miss the auto-resonance-finding.  I've been roughly scanning the Y-ALS offset to find the POY zero crossing when I see the resonance on the test mass face cameras. 

The next-biggest conclusion, is that I can hold the PRFPMI close to resonance, using ALS for CARM and DARM.  I was trying to transition DARM to AS55, but I couldn't get the last bit of the way.  That is, I couldn't turn off the ALS control.  So, I think that AS55 wasn't actually holding DARM, until maybe the last moment or so.

Anyhow, here are some time series.  My average TRX value is around 40 counts, and POPDC is maybe 250 counts (just PRMI, POPDC is about 75 counts).  Obviously this is noisy as hell, but I'm not using any IR signals for the arms.  Near the end of this first time series, I am trying to switch to AS55 for DARM.

Zooming in, my real lockloss is due to PRCL oscillating at ~350 Hz:

However, I also saw ~25Hz peaks in CARM and DARM on the spectra starting to show up, and I see a ~25 Hz oscillation in DARM a few moments after the PRCL lockloss.  (Plot #2 is a zoom of the ~1.1 second mark on Plot #3.)

The locking parameters:

CARM:

Input:  Using the new CESAR matrix, -1*ALSX, +1*ALSY.  Beatnotes both move up in freq if temp sliders move up.

Servo: gain = 6, FMs 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 on.  Offset = 0 counts. 

Output = -1*MC2

DARM:

Input:  +1*ALSX, +1*ALSY

Servo:  gain = 4.  FMs 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 on.  Offset = 0 counts.

Output = -1*ETMX, +1*ETMY

PRCL:

Input:  +1*REFL33_I, Norm = +0.01*POPDC, sqrt engaged.

Servo:  acquisition easier with -0.04 or -0.06, less gain peaking at -0.02   FMs 4, 5 on; 2, 3, 6, 9 triggered with 0.5 sec delay.  Servo trigger = POPDC, up 100, down 10.  FM trigger = POPDC, up 300, down 20.

Output = +1*PRM

PRCL ASC off, PRM oplev on.

MICH:

Input:  +1*REFL33_Q, Norm = +0.01*POPDC, sqrt engaged.

Servo:  gain = 2, FMs 4, 5 on; 2, 3 triggered with 0.2 sec delay.  Servo trigger = POPDC, up 100, down 10.  FM trigger = POPDC, up 300, down 20.

Output = +0.5*BS, -0.2625*PRM

PDs:

REFL33 analog gain set to 30 dB for both I&Q.

AS55 set to 0 dB for both I&Q.  AS55 had DC normalization of 80 counts (which was the measured number for PRFPMI when TRX was about 0.1 count this evening)

This seems the ever best stability at the zero offset PRFPMI.

Can you look at REFLDC in this data stream too? How was it promising?

Here is 1 second of data, with REFLDC, POPDC and TRX:

Here is a zoom of the first 3 big peaks in TRX.  The weird jumps at the beginning of each TRX peak are due to the triggered switching between the Thorlabs trans PD and the QPD trans PD.  Clearly we need to work on their relative normalizations.  There are also little jumps after each peak as the triggering sends the signal back to the Thorlabs PD.

Here is a zoom of the single big peak about halfway through the 1 second of data:

And here is a zoom of the tail of that peak.  It looks to me like we want to start thinking about using REFL DC when our transmitted powers are around 2 counts.  We could do as soon as 1 count, but 2 is a little farther into the dip.

 maybe the tantalum caps on the daughter board power supply lines are blown? If so, replace with 35V+ ceramic.

I added ~1m of cable to the LO side of the REFL11 Demodulator, which brought its PRCL demod phase to about 8 degrees. According to my simulations, PRCL and CARM have the same angle (but opposite sign) at resonance. There seems to be a severe lack of SMA cables in the lab, so I didn't tune it to be any closer. Cos(8 degrees)=.99, so I think it should be fine to use it for the CARM servo, since none of the other signals are going to be nearly as big. I plugged analog REFL 11 I back into the CARM servo IN1. 

As for IN2, I threw together a temporary setup for using REFLDC as a complementary signal. I T'd off the REFLDC signal (which is the DC signal out of REFL55), and sent it into an SR560 to subtract an offset. The offset comes from a 1Hz-passive-pomona-box-low-passed C1:IOO-TT4_LR output, since there are 8 DAC channels set up for the nonexistent tip tilts 3 and 4 actively running. The output of the SR560 is sent to the CARM servo IN2. 

I adjusted the offset by turning on only IN2 in the CARM servo MEDM screen, and looking at the CM_SLOW signal in data viewer. I adjusted gains and such to get it to look just like REFLDC with the PRC locked. There was good coherence and no appreciable phase difference from DC out to some kHz, albeit a dip in coherence to about .8-.9 from ~40 to 300Hz, for some reason. (This included turning on the unWhite FM in the REFLDC filter bank)

If this signal turns out to be useful, it will be relatively straightforward to put together a little box that does the offset subtraction nicely, but this should do for our immediate needs.

Lastly, I hung up this plot in the control room to give us information about the DC values of different signals as the CARM offset changes. This is helpful to see what our CARM offset is, based on the transmission we se, when different signals start to have length dependence, where they start/stop being linear, etc. The TRX curve is scaled to a maximum of 600, REFLDC is normalized to input power = 1, and all the rest are arbitrarily scaled to fit on the plot. I've assumed 75ppm loss on all mirrors in my simulation (PRM, BS, 2xITM, 2xETM), mostly to get some realistic profile of REFLDC. 

The main problem was a panel fixing bolt that caused the short circuits between power supply layers.
This burned the PCB and secondarily caused permanent short circuit between +15V/-15V/+5V layers.

Diagnosis

- The resistances between +15V, +5V, and -15V were low. The resistance between +15V and -15V is 13 Ohm.
  The one between +5V and -15V is 7Ohm. And the one between +15 and +5 is 19Ohm. So the situation is

                o -15V
                |
+15V o-(13 Ohm)-+-(9 Ohm)-o +5V

Even after removing all of the active components from the board, they remained the same.

- The tantalum caps were removed from the board and it was confirmed that they are not the cause of the issue.

- The panel was removed from the module for the component migration to a spare board (to be described in the other entry).
I found that the screw hole and the screw have burnt marks. The screw need an insulation tube to avoid short circuit.
The other screw was also bare. The spare board has the screws with the insulation tubes.

[ericq, Jenne, Zach]

We spent some time tonight trying to push our CARM locking further, to little avail. DARM/CARM loop oscillations kept sneaking up on us. We measured some MC2 motion -> REFL11 Transfer Functions to see if we could see CARM plant features; plots will come in the near future...

I went to WB and found the last spare module of D990399 revB. We need to thank Frank for his foresight.

The original (=broken) board had various modifications from this revB.
I had to check the schemaric diagram and the difference between the boards and migrate some of the SMD components from left to right.

Here is the deciphered features of the QPD whitening board:
- The input stage is a VGA amp (AD602). It has the internal input impedance of 100 Ohm. The series resister
  of 909 Ohm gives us 1/10 voltage division! It is more tricky as the QPD (D990272) has the output impedances of 50Ohm
  (for the both side of the differential out) and on resistance of MAX333A. So it could have been deviated by ~10% from the nominal.

- Variable gain control: The input has 1/10 voltage division. The gain is fixed at the unity. In total the gain of the variable control stage is 1/10.
  This gives us the gain range of +42dB/-22dB for +10V/-10V. The actual range is limited to be -10~30dB.

- Whitening stages. Each channel has two sets of the whitening path and the bypass path.
  They could be switched by binary control inputs but I permanently enabled the whitening by pulling the MAX333 control inputs to the ground.
  The whitening zero and pole are at 4.02Hz and 40.6Hz.

  Each bypass path has an additional cap of 220pF in parallel to 35.7kOhm (R101 and R103 for CH1), resulting in the pole at 20.2kHz.
  Each whitening paths had a 5.6nF cap (C53 and C64). This cap was replaced with 350pF, resulting in the move of the pole freq from 800Hz to 12.7kHz.

- There are two anti-aliasing stages which were designed for 2kHz sampling rate. They are identical sallen key 2nd-order LPFs with fc=766Hz and Q=0.74 (~ butterworth).
  As all of these caps were removed, they are just voltage followers now.

- The final stage (AD620) has the gain resister of 16.5k. The gain is 1+(49.4k/16.5k) = 3.99.

- The 4pin lemo connector (J8) was removed from the board. We instead installed an isolated BNC connector on the panel for the thorlabs PD serving as the high gain PD.

- There is a daughter board for the high gain PD. This seems to be the butterworth low pass filter with fc=~30kHz.
  The differential output of the daughter board is connected to pin 17 and 18 of J10 (S5 Out and Rtn).

- The input of the daughter board is differential (AD620). Therefore the LEMO connectros next to the BNC were wrapped with Kapton tapes for isolation.

Board test at the workbench.

- The test required two dual power supply as the unit requires +/-5V and +/-15V.

- The four channels were tested with the signal injection. 1kHz input yielded 20mVpp across the AD602 input. The output of the 1st whitening stage was
  60mVpp. This makes sense as the gain of the AD620 is -10dB (1/10 and 10dB). The output of the 2nd whitening stage was 600mVpp.
  Finally the output of the output stage was confirmed to be 2400mVpp. This was confirmed for four channels.

- The daughter board output was also checked. The gain is the unity and flat upto ~10kHz.

Board installation

- Jenne installed the module. This time there was no smoke.

Gain mystery

- It was not sure how the whitening gains have been given.

- The corresponding database entry was found in /cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1auxey/ETMYaux.db as

grecord(ao,"C1:ASC-QPDY_S1WhiteGain")
grecord(ao,"C1:ASC-QPDY_S2WhiteGain")
grecord(ao,"C1:ASC-QPDY_S3WhiteGain")
grecord(ao,"C1:ASC-QPDY_S4WhiteGain")

- The gains for S2-S4 were set to be 30. However, C1:ASC-QPDY_S1WhiteGain was set to be 8.62068.
And it was not writable.

- After some investigation, it was found that the database was wrong. The DAC channel was changed from S100 to S0.
The corrected entry is shown here.

grecord(ao,"C1:ASC-QPDY_S1WhiteGain")
{
        field(DESC,"Whitening gain for QPDY Seg 1")
        field(DTYP,"VMIVME-4116")
        field(OUT,"#C0 S0 @")
        field(PREC,"1")
        field(EGUF,"42")
        field(EGUL,"-22")
        field(EGU,"dB")
        field(LINR,"LINEAR")
        field(DRVH,"30")
        field(DRVL,"-10")
        field(HOPR,"30")
        field(LOPR,"-10")
}

- Once c1auxey was rebooted, the S1 whitening gain became writable. Now all of the channels were set to be +30dB (max).

 Probably things would have worked better if you would have gotten your hair done at the same place as me.

Inspired by a comment by Koji the other day, I spent some time yesterday and today working on locking a (very lossy) power recycled Y-arm. ITMX was misaligned, to save myself the headache of dealing with ITMY getting a sign flip and ITMX staying the same when the arm resonates. 

My main goal was to achieve high bandwidth control with the analog CARM servo. 

TL,DR: Transisitoned 90% to REFLDC through CM_SLOW at TRY = 2.1 twice. Couldn't make it all the way over. 

PRCL settings:

• Input: REFL165 I.
• Actuate on PRM +1
• Control: G=-.32 (~100Hz UGF); Acq on FM 4,5; Trig 1,2,3,6,9 (I modified the +10dB in FM1 to a 1kHz ELP)
• Trig: POP 110 I: 1.5 up, 0 down (max was around 4 counts, very weak PRC!)

The PRC was very stable in this configuration, which doesn't surprise me due to its simplicity. I was honestly a little surprised there was enough light to lock on 3f. REFL33 didn't work. 

My efforts to bring the Y-arm into lock were very similar to the CARM procedure we've been using recently. (Which is the motivation for this exercise)

At first I was actuating on ETMY, and got to the point where I wanted to start bringing in the CARM servo slow output, then realized that I didn't want to actuate both on the ETM and MC AO. (Maybe this would be doable, but in the end, not what I'm interested in learning about in terms of overlap with CARM locking)

From then on, I only actuated YARM on MC2. (Heads up, my lock-losses will show up in the trends of the MC2 Trans addition to the WFS.)

Transitioning the arm to SqrtInv TRY control was just as straightforward as it has been for CARM. However, engaging the LSCLock FM (FM4), would sometimes work beautifully, and sometimes kick the hell out of MC2. Keeping an eye on the error signal spectrum and UGF gave no indication which outcome would happen. Once FM4 could be engaged, the transmitted power was very stable. Without FM4, reducing the offset didn't get very far without losing lock. 

I tried a few times to bring in CM_slow (set to just IN2, i.e. offset adjusted REFLDC), at arbitrary arm powers, with little success. I didn't know how much arm power to expect at resonance, and thus didn't really know where on the line width I was.

I knew I was mostly outside of the linear regime of the PDH signals, since, even though I had good coherence between, say, REFL11 I and SqrtInvTry, with an ETMY excitation on; when I would turn TRY normalization on/off, I would see the sign of the TF change. 

I then realized that I could actively keep an eye on the trend of POY11, to see when I got to the PDH "hump", which is where REFLDC starts being usable, and SqrtInv is reaching its limit. 

This brought me to a YARM offset of .115, with a steady TRY of about 2.1. I adjusted the analog offset of the REFLDC input to the CARM board, and the digital gain of the CMSLOW input filter to get 1:1 correspondence between CMSLOW and the SQRTINVY channels. Their spectra were neigh identical, with CMSLOW having slightly more high frequency noise. 

I started stepping SQRTINV down by .1, and upping CMSLOW by .1. This shifted the offset around, so I opted for taking away gain before bringing it back, because I didn't want to get so close to resonance that SQRTINV would freak out. I got to .1*SQRTINVY + .9*CMSLOW, and lost lock. TRY was getting noisier as I made the transition. 

I'm not sure what exactly was the reason for failure. I'm going to go back over some of the data to try to get an idea.. Maybe I should've loosened up some of the gain/boosts during the transition. 

So, no great success story yet, but this configuration is a lot simpler than the full PRFPMI, and I feel that I should soon be able to get it fully controlled, and figure out a systematic way to make the digital to analog transition for this PRFP cavity, and thus have a much more informed basis for doing the same for CARM control. 

The measured open loop TF of the ALS Phase Tracker loop for each arm was characterized by an empirical model on LISO.

The model for the open loop TF has pole 1m instead of the one at DC as LISO has a difficulty to model it.
Digital time delay and the sampling effect seem to be well represented by a zero at ~8kHz and delay of  ~60us.
(cf 16kHz sampling => 61us)

The XARM phase tracker has the UGF of 1.5kHz. This is too low because
1) The phase rotation at 100Hz is visible in the plot.
2) We don't much care about the closed loop bump in the phase tracker as long as the phase tracker keeps its continuity.

So I suggest to increase the gain so that we have the UGF of 3kHz. (phase margin: 24deg)

The red curve in the plot is the closed loop response calculated by CLTF =  - OLTF / (1-OLTF).

The model results are used in the ALS servo models.