The vac controls system is going down for migration from Python 2.7 to 3.4. Will advise when it is back up.

I've converted all the vac control system code to run on Python 3.4, the latest version available through the Debian package manager. Note that these codes now REQUIRE Python 3.x. We decided there was no need to preserve Python 2.x compatibility. I'm leaving the vac system returned to its nominal state ("vacuum normal + RGA").

Five Agilent pressure gauges were delivered to the 40m. It is stored with the controller and cables in the office area. This completes the inventory for the gauge replacement - we have all the ordered parts in hand (though. not necessarily all the adaptor flanges etc). I'll see if I can find some cabinet space in the VEA to store these, the clutter is getting out of hand again...
 

in addition, the spare gate valve from LHO was also delivered today to the 40m. It is stored at EX with the other spare valves. 

I'm trying to get more of the simplant models running so that we (me and Sasha Surf) can get a full real-time cavity simplant running.  As I reported last week, c1spx is running again on c1iscex.

The two new simplant models are c1sup, which holds the simplant for ITMX, and c1lsp, which holds the IFO simplant, specifically the one we're working on for XARM.

Here's the relevant info:

model  host     dcuid  cpu
c1spx  c1iscex  61     4
c1sup  c1sus    62     6
c1lsp  c1lsc    60     6

c1spx and c1sup will be running the sus_single_plant parts for ETMX and ITMX simplant.  All the simplant suspension channels will be names "SUP" (as opposed to "SUS" for control).

c1lsp is now running, but c1sup won't run for unknown reasons.  The c1sup model is not very complicated, and in fact is more-or-less identical to c1spx.  It compiles and installs and even loads, but it completely unresponsive after loading.  Unfortunately I've had enough CDS bullshit for today, so I'll try to figure out what's going on tomorrow.

[Sanjit,Jenne]

Sanjit has been working today on trying to get the OAF coefficients to save properly.  Alex got us most of the way, but right now it's looking like the filter that is being saved is totally constant (all the values are the same).  We're poking around trying to figure out why this is. 

Also, we're starting again (as we should have been for the last week or so since Alex came in to help us) to check in the TOP_XFCODE whenever we make changes to it, and when we recompile the front end code. 

We are manually restarting assepics, but the terminal logs us out after sometime and ass may crash. I set autologout=0 in the terminal for the time being. Once the testing process is over, assepics will start automatically when the computer is turned on, so we wont have to worry about this.

(if ass crashes tonight, it is not unexpected!)

I made some changes in the code (all commented in the installed and SVN version) to print the filter coefficients. I got crazy output. Sometimes memory bugs lead to such crazy behavior. So far I could not find any bugs, but will have to spend more time on it.

Something strange was going on in the OAF code, printf would print a double precision number in %f format but not in %lf or %e format!

Since we know this problem now, we can move forward, but it will be important to know why printf was restricted and if there are other such constraints which we should remember while making changes in the codes.

1) Filled in the C1SUS_BS_OLMATRIX properly so as to make the BS oplev work for Steve.

2) Turned on the ITMX damping.  Apparently it had tripped this morning, possibly due to work in the lab area.

3) The ETMX FE controller (c1scx) had ADC timed out and died sometime around 8:30 am.  The c1x01 (the IOP on the ETMX computer) was also indicating a FB status error (mismatch in DAQ channels).

The reported error in dmesg on c1iscex was:

[1628690.250002] c1spx: ADC TIMEOUT 0 3541 21 3605
[1628690.250002] c1scx: ADC TIMEOUT 0 3541 21 3605

Just to be safe, I rebuilt the c1x01 and c1scx models, ran ./activateDAQ.py, and used the scripts killc1spx, killc1scx, and killc1x01.

I finally restarted the process with startc1x01, startc1scx, and startc1spx.  Everything is currently alive and indicating all green.

Populating the BHD Optics

• Mounted Thorlabs NB1-K14 into OMC1R1 and OMC1R2 (Attachments 1/2)
• Mounted CVI Y1-LW-1-1025-UV-45-P/AR into OMC1R2/3 and OMC2R2/3. (Attachments 3/4)
• Mounted HWP and TFPs (Attachments 5)
• 2 TFPs and 2 HWPs were aligned and adjusted to maximize the transmission.
• OMC1R1 and OMC1R2 were aligned to take the refl beam from these mirrors.

OMC mode matching

• OMC mode matching was <0.96.
• Moved the last lens closer to the first lens.
• This made the floor of the OMC refl output to be 74.4mV while the unlocked voltage was 4.78V. The dark offset was -5.4mV.
• This gave us the mode matching of 0.983. This is close to the value I had in the OMC lab.
• The image of the refl camera in a lock (Attachment 6) indicated that most of the mode mismatch is gone and the symmetric higher-order component remains.

OMC servo actuator range

• Inserted Ithaco 1201 Low Noise Voltage Preamplifier after the Moku (Attachment 7). The gain was set to be 10.
• The PZT output in Moku was set to be 0dB (instead of 14dB) and the output limitter was set to be 0~1V.
• The gain of the digital filter (notch filter) was reduced to be 0dB.
• This made the input swing for the PZT HV amp to be 0~10V. This is the full scale of the HV amp input range.
• Consequently, the Moku's PZT output range was increased. This made both the lock acquision and the long term stability significantly improved.

I am putting a little bit of brain power into reviving the ASS, and I want to write down what the motivation is, and what the short and long-term plans are.

Why?

The IFO IR is not optimally aligned right now.  While we were at atmosphere, we should have taken the time to align the green beams to the arms until the greens were both resonating TEM00.  We were lazy, and excited to pump down, so we decided that locking on higher order modes was good enough to ensure the beams came out of vacuum.  Once we were pumped down, ITMY and ETMY were aligned to the green beam axis.  Then, the IR was aligned to this new Yarm cavity axis.  This would have been okay, and pretty close, if we had aligned the green beam all the way (used only the outside steering mirrors to resonate TEM00, after the cavity mirrors were aligned for flashing IR).  After the IR was aligned to the Ygreen axis, the rest of the IFO was aligned to this slightly-incorrect input pointing.  We want to measure the IR spot positions on ITMY and ETMY so that we can tweak the input pointing until we hit the center of both ITMY and ETMY.  Then we will align Ygreen's input pointing to this proper IR cavity axis.  The rest of the IFO alignment will also have to be redone.  This calls for a functioning A2L system, so the measurement part of the ASS.

The immediate motivation for measuring the spot positions is that the current Xarm IR axis is not at all very close to the Xgreen axis.  The other day while we were fixing up the Xend table (note in elog 8162), we found that the TRX beam to the TRX PD and the trans camera was clipped on the 2" harmonic separator (which is the first optic that the transmitted IR beam sees on the end tables).  It was clipping on the left side of the optic, if you are looking at the face of the optic.  This is the more east-erly side of the optic.  We moved that optic to the side so that we were not clipping.  Then, today when Manasa was trying to align the Xgreen beam, she found that it was clipping on the right side of the harmonic separator, the more west-erly side.  I remember seeing that the green beam was roughly centered on the harmonic separator when we were at atmosphere, so this clipping is certainly due to Yuta, Evan and my moving of the harmonic separator.  Since the end green steering optics are not very orthogonal in angle/translation, it is very difficult to translate the beam by a significant amount.  If we keep the current IR alignment, which surely isn't good anyway (you can see on the ETMXF camera that the beam isn't centered), we would probably have to move the Xgreen steering optics, which would be a total pain.  It seems that the better plan is to leave them where they are, and get the IR pointing in the correct direction, and move the harmonic separator back to where it was originally.

Short term (< few days):

Write the arm section of the existing MeasureSpotPositions.py script (in ....../scripts/ASS).  Write a wrapper script that, like ...../scripts/ASS/MC/mcassMCdecenter, calls sets up the lockins, runs MeasureSpotPositions.py, and calculates the calibrated spot positions.  Use this information to hand tweak the input pointing, then realign the cavities to the new IR, and the greens to the new cavity axes.

All of the infrastructure for this is already in place in the c1ass model.   The only drawback to the current situation is the LSC output matrix only has one row for ASS, and so only one cavity can be measured at a time.  To make things faster, we could consider increasing the size of the LSC output matrix so that the 2 arms could be measured simultaneously.  This change is low priority for now.

Long term:

Make the full ASS system work. 

A major change from the current situation is that the current ASS cannot actuate on the input pointing (TT1 and TT2 for Yarm, BS for Xarm).  We want a low bandwidth servo to force the input beam to follow the cavity axis.  Implementing this will require some changes to the ASS model. 

Remeasure sensing matrix, test system.

I have modified the MeasureSpotPositions.py script to accept the arms as valid cavities (it used to give an error "Sorry, this only works for MC right now").

There is still no wrapper script to turn on lockins and turn them off after the measurement, so I have not tested the arm A2L yet.  But I should be able to tomorrow, or whenever the IFO is next available.

To-do:

* Write the wrapper script (analog of mcassMCdecenter).

* Fix arm assOff, assDown, assOn, assUp scripts to match the current channel names (which were changed long ago to be human-readable, versus mysterious numbers).

* Test.

Andri and I mounted the Raicol Crystal #724 in one of the new Covesion Ovens. The procedure was the same as before - see elog entry here.

There was one issue - the glass plate that goes on top of the crystal is coated on one side with ITO (Indium-Tin Oxide) and it's not 100% certain that this was mounted in the correct orientation. It is virtually impossible to tell which side of the glass is coated.

The base plate of the oven was tapped for an M3 hole. We retapped it for an 8-32 and bolted it to a post and that one of the New Focus 4-axis translation stage. The assembly is currently bolted to the PSL table, awaiting use.

I mounted the new projector to the pipe where the old projector was attached. The mounting hardware wasn't designed for attaching to a pipe, but with Steve's help I mounted the projector. The projector is angled away from the area of the wall designated as the screen, and I am going to meet with Steve Monday to fix this.

{Mayank, Koji, JC, Yehonathan, Ruben}  (Text by Mayank)

We moved the all the boards from the table to the rack and connected the power strip to the rack.

On powering it up we noticed that the SATAMP board tripped automatically. We removed the boards and opened the SATAMP board to find a burned switch. -> Koji replaced the switch of that unit.

We replaced a new SATAMP board with a spare and reconnected all the boards to external Sorensens brought from the spare pile and all the boards were working fine (The suspension was damping).

----

We removed all the unnecessary old boards on the rack and tried to power the boards again one by one with the rack-mount Sorensens. This time the Anti-Aliasing board tripped (thankfully/hopefully without any damage).

Koji pointed out that this could happen if the polarity of power was reversed and JC found out that indeed this was the case.  We corrected this and suspensions work now. ADCs are working fine the Eurocrate boads (Oplev and Transmission QPD) are not working as they have some power issue.  

Learning: The D type power connecters are not polarized enough. It can be inserted the wrong way if pushed.(Attachment 6) 

Because of the network interference we've had from the CLIO system for the past 3-4 days, I asked the guys to remove

the test stand from the 40m lab area. It is now in the 40m control room. Since it needed an ethernet connection to get out

for some reason we've let them hook into GC. Also, instead of using a real timing signal slaved to the GPS, Jay suggested

just skipping it and having the Timing Slave talk to itself by looping back the fiber with the timing signal. Osamu will enter

more details, but this is just to give a status update.

I moved the RCG to the advLigoRTS-2.5 tag:

controls@c1iscey ~ 0$ ls -al /opt/rtcds/rtscore/release
lrwxrwxrwx 1 controls 1001 19 Jul 30 12:02 /opt/rtcds/rtscore/release -> tags/advLigoRTS-2.5
controls@c1iscey ~ 0$ 

There are only very minor differences between what we were running on the the 2.5 branch.  I have NOT rebuilt all the models yet.

I was hoping that there was something in the tagged release that might fix this hard-crash-on-filter-load issue that we're seeing in the c1tst model.  It didn't.  Still have no idea what's going on there.

 After that RFM -> OAF communication through PCIE became bad again. Inside CommData2.c cache flushing is not allowed

// If PCIE comms show errors, may want to add this cache flushing
            #if 0
            if(ipcInfo[ii].netType == IPCIE)
                clflush_cache_range (ipcInfo[ii].pIpcData->dBlock[sendBlock][ipcIndex].data, 16);
            #endif

As a result, a significant part of MC_F and other signals is lost during RFM -> OAF transmission (270 - 330 out of 2048 per second)

Last time when I replaced 0 for 1, it suspended SUS machine because of the code bug. Alex modified a couple of files in the old version and it started to work. Do you know if this bug is fixed in the new version?

[Anchal, Paco]

We moved chiara to 1X7 above nodus and powered with same UPS from a battery backed port. The UPS is at 40% load capacity. The nameserver and nfs came back online automatically on boot up.

We moved the Zurich instruments HF2LI to CAML. IMG_7669.JPG

We looked at the DRMI noise spectrum and chose new excitation frequencies such that the lines are lower in frequency than before (~300 Hz instead of 800 Hz) and also not in some noisy region.

New filters is saved and loaded for all LSC DOFs.

Frequencies are:

• CARM: 309.21 Hz
• DARM: 307.88 Hz
• MICH: 311.1 Hz
• PRCL: 313.31 Hz
• SRCL: 315.17 Hz

POP110 and POP22 demod angles were adjusted for DRMI lock. 

Last week, I never achieved a fully 1F lock, REFL165 was used for SRCL. Tonight, we created input matrix settings for pure 1F locking, and did some signal mixing to reduce the PRCL to SRCL coupling. The PRCL to MICH coupling was already low, since AS55 is fairly insensitive to PRCL. 

Similarly, for the 3F signals, some signal mixing of REFL33I and REFL165Q was used to reduce the PRCL to MICH coupling. The PRCL to SRCL coupling in REFL165 isn't too bad, so no compensation was done. Interestingly, in this setting, the 3F MICH and SRCL signals agree with the 1F signals on their zero crossing, so no offsets are needed. REFL33 I does need an offset, however, to match the REFL11I PRCL zero crossing. 

The DRMI acquires faster with SRCL set to 165I. Once acquired, the 1F/3F can be made smoothly, and both settings are very stable. The sensing matrix in each setting is consistent with each other. (The PRCL and SRCL lines in AS55 change, but really I shouldn't even plot them, since they're not very coherent). 

For some reason, these show a sign flip relative to last week's measurements. The relative angles are consistent, though. 

Next up is finding the right coefficient for the SRM in the MICH output matrix, when actuating on the BS. 

Last night, and again just now, I used the ./MC2_spot_[direction] scripts to center the MC2 spot on the trans QPD.  The MCWFS handled overall alignment to correct for the fact that the ratios in the script aren't perfect.  When I was finished, I ran the MC WFS relief script from the WFS screen.  Last night, and again today, things had drifted until the yaw spot was more than 0.5 counts off.

As previously noted, there are multiple beams coming back from the ETM surface onto the PDH PD on the end table. They are spread out in a vertical pattern. All the spots swing together (as the ETM moves?).

I moved the PDH Green PD on the end table so that it was further away from the Faraday and I added an iris in between the Faraday and the PD. Now only the principle reflection from the ETM is incident on the PD. See attached photos. In order to sneak past the neighbouring optics, I had to steer the beam down a bit, so the PD is now lower than it previously was.

Just FYI: the angle between the returning beams is about 5 or 6 mrad at the PD. Before the beams get to the PD they go through a telescope that de-magnifies the beam by about 5 or 6 times. This implies that the angle between adjacent returning beams from the ETM is around 1 mrad at the ETM.

This does make the position of the spot on the PD more susceptible to the alignment of the ETM - we should use a short focal length lens and image the ETM plane onto the PD.

First image - overview of table

Second image - the three returning beams immediately before the IRIS

Third image - a close up of the IRIS and PDH PD. 

Problem:

Need a working IO chassis connected to c1ioo in order to bring the MC_L into the digital realm, and then via RFM transmit to the c1sus machine.

Attempted Solution:

Move the c1iscey IO chassis to c1ioo while the c1ioo chassis is at downs.

The c1iscey chassis however doesn't seem to be talking to the c1ioo computer.  I tried changing the host interface card on the c1ioo chassis.  I took out One Stop Systems HIB2-x4-H interface card with serial number 26638 from the c1ioo computer and put in the One Stop Systems HIB2-x4-H with serial number 35242 in from c1iscey into c1ioo.  Still didn't work.

All the lights are red on the interface card on the actual chassis and its cooling fan isn't spinning. 

Using dmesg on c1ioo shows that it does not see any of the ADC/DAC/BO cards.

Status:

I'm going to  wait until tomorrow morning when Rolf gets a chance to look at the c1ioo chassis over at Downs to determine the next step.  If we fix the c1ioo chassis, I'm move the c1iscey chassis and its host interface board back to the end.

[Tega, Anchal, Paco]

After talking to Anchal, it was made clear that chiara is not the place to host the modbus service for the temperature sensors. The obvious machine is c1pem, but the startup cmd script loads c object files and it is not clear how easy it would integrate the modbus functionality since we can only login via telnet, so we decided to instead host the service on c1susaux. We also modified the /etc/motd file on c1susaucx which displays the welcome message during login to inform the user that this machine hosts the modbus service for the temperature sensor. Anchal plans to also document this information on the temperature sensor wiki at some point in the future when the page is updated to include what has been learnt so far.

We might also consider updating the database file to a more modern way of reading the temperature sensor data using FLOAT32_LE which is available on EPICs version 3.14 and above, instead of the current method which works but leaves the reader bemused by the bitwise operations that convert the two 16 bits words (A and B) to IEEE-754 32-bit float, via 

field(CALC, "(A&D?(A&C?-1:1):0)*((G|A&E)*J+B)*2^((A&D)/G-F)")

where 

   field(INPA, "$HiWord")
   field(INPB, "$LoWord")
   field(INPC, "0x8000")   # Hi word, sign bit
   field(INPD, "0x7F80")   # Hi word, exponent mask
   field(INPE, "0x00FF")   # Hi word, mantissa mask (incl hidden bit)
   field(INPF, "150")      # Exponent offset plus 23-bit mantissa shift
   field(INPG, "0x0080")   # Mantissa hidden bit
   field(INPJ, "65536")    # Hi/Lo mantissa ratio
   field(CALC, "(A&D?(A&C?-1:1):0)*((G|A&E)*J+B)*2^((A&D)/G-F)")
   field(PREC, "4")

as opposed to the more modern form

field(INP,"@asyn($(PORT) $(OFFSET))FLOAT32_LE")

When I put away the lenses we had used for measuring the RF transfer functions of the QPD heads, I saw that I'd removed them from the cabinet containing green endtable optics, but hadn't noticed the sign forbidding their removal. I'll talk with Koji/Gautam about what happened and what should be done.

[Jenne, Mirko]

We moved our one STS1 from the x-arm end to the vortex. We record the data as STS1 in c1pem @ 256Hz. x is still north-south.

JD:  This is actually an STS-2.  We just call it C1:PEM-SEIS_STS1.... to differentiate the 3 STSs that we have from one another (assuming we plug in the other two).

[Paco, Ian, Tega]

We moved the white rack (formerly unused along the YARM) to a position between 1X3, and 1X4. For this task we temporarily removed the hepas near the enclosures, but have since restored them.

I looked at the CAD layout and it seems like we will clearly be clipping POY if we move SRM by 7.5cm. Since POY is not visible at low power, we cannot be sure about the clipping.

We should have a plan B before we move everything. I suggest we move a combination of SRM and SR2 to get the desired SRC length.
Moving SR2 will require extra effort to walk the beam unclipped through all the 6 output steering mirrors that follow; but there will be little room for error if we use irides to propagate the beam through the first 4 mirrors that are in the BS and ITMY chamber.

We turned off the power of the seismometers and moved the Guralp1 close to the STS. Both are now situated below the center of the mode cleaner vacuum tube.

We oriented the X axis of the STS & Guralp1 along the X axis of the interferometer. Then we turned on the power again, but the STS channels don't give any signal. We think this is, because we didn't push the auto zero button.

 After pressing the auto-zero button (a lot of times) of the STS breakout box & aligning the bubble in the STS, we could finally get data from STS (Bacardi). So, now STS2 (Bacardi - Serial NR. 100151) is working!

The teststand has some non-trivial issue with Myrinet card (either software or hardware) which even teh experts are saying they don't remember how to fix it. CDS with mx was iin use more than a decade ago, so it is hard to find support for issues with it now and will be the same in future. We need to wrap up this test procedure one way or another now, so I have following two options moving forward:

Direct integration with main CDS and testing

• We can just connect the c1sus2 and c1bhd FE computers to martian network directly.
• We'll have to connect c1sus2 and c1bhd to the optical fiber subnetwork as well.
• On booting, they would get booted through the exisitng fb1 boot server which seems to work fine for the other 5 FE machines.
• We can update teh DHCP in chiara and reload it so that we can ssh into these FEs with host names.
• Hopefully, presence of these computers won't tank the existing CDS even if they  themselves have any issues, as they have no shared memory with other models.
• If this works, we can do the loop back testing of I/O chassis using the main DAQ network and move on with our upgrade.
• If this does not work and causes any harm to exisitng CDS network, we can disconnect these computers and go back to existing CDS. Recently, our confidence on rebooting the CDS has increased with the robust performance as some legacy issues were fixed.
• We'll however, continue to use a CDS which is no more supported by the current LIGO CDS group.

Testing CDS upgrade on teststand

• From what I could gather, most of the hardware in I/O chassis that I could find, is still used in CDS of LLO and LHO, with their recent tests and documents using the same cards and PCBs.
• There might be some difference in the DAQ network setup that I need to confirm.
• I've summarised the current c1teststand hardware on this wiki page.
• If the latest CDS is backwards compatible with our hardware, we can test the new CDS in teh c1teststand setup without disrupting our main CDS. We'll have ample help and support for this upgrade from the current LIGO CDS group.
• We can do the loop back testing of the I/O chassis as well.
• If the upgrade is succesfull in the teststand without many hardware changes, we can upgrade the main CDS of 40m as well, as it has the same hardware as our teststand.
• Biggest plus point would be that out CDS will be up-to-date and we will be able to take help from CDS group if any trouble occurs.

So these are the two options we have. We should discuss which one to take in the mattermost chat or in upcoming meeting.

I've finished the MEDM portion of the RCG FiltMuxMatrix part.  Now it generates an appropriate medm screen for the matrix, with links to all the filter banks.  The filter bank .adl files are also generated, and placed in a sub directory with the name of the filter matrix as the name of the sub directory.

The input is the first number and the output is the second number.  This particular matrix has 5 inputs (0 through 4) and 15 outputs (0 through 14). Unfortunately, the filter names can't be longer than 24 characters, which forced me to use numbers instead of actual part names for the input and output.

The key to the numbers is:

Inputs:

DARM 0
MICH 1
PRC 2
SRC 3
CARM 4

Outputs:

AS_DC 0
AS11_I 1
AS11_Q 2
AS55_I 3
AS55_Q 4
POP_DC 5
POP11_I 6
POP11_Q 7
POP55_I 8
POP55_Q 9
REFL_DC 10
REFL11_I 11
REFL11_Q 12
REFL55_I 13
REFL55_Q 14

To get this working required modifications to the feCodeGen.pl and the creation of mkfiltmatrix.pl (which was based off of mkmatrix.pl).  These are located in /cvs/cds/caltech/cds/advLigoRTS/src/epics/util/

In related news, I asked Valera if he could load the simulated plant filters he had generated, and after several tries, his answer was no.  He says it has the same format as those filter they pass to the feed forward banks down in Livingston, so he's not sure why they won't work.

I tested my script, FillFotonFilterMatrix.py, on some simple second order section filters (like gain of 1, with b1 = 1.01, b2 = 0.02, a1 = 1.03, a2 = 1.04), and it populated the foton filter file correctly, and was parsed fine by Foton itself.  So I'm going to claim the script is done and its the fault of the filters we're trying to load.  This script is now living in /cvs/cds/caltech/chans/ , along with a name file called lsp_dof2pd_mtrx.txt which tells the script that DARM is 0, CARM is 1, etc.  To run it, you also need a SOS.txt file with the filters to load, similar to the one Valera posted here, but preferably loadable.

I also updated my progess on the wiki, here.

Now I am studying about the behavior of the Q-factor in the resonant circuit because the Q-factor of the circuit directly determine the performance as the EOM driver.

Here I summarize the fundamental which explains why Q-factor is important.

 --------------------------------------

The EOM driver circuit can be approximately described as shown in figure below

Z represents the impedance of a resonant circuit.

In an ideal case, the transformer just raise the voltage level n-times larger.  Rin is the output impedance of the signal source and usually has 50[Ohm].

The transformer also makes the impedance Z 1/n^2 smaller. Therefore this configuration gives a following relation between Vin and Vout.

 Where G is the gain for the voltage. And G goes to a maximum value when Rin=Z/n². This relation is shown clearly in the following plot.

 Note that I put Rin=50 [Ohm] for calculating the plot.

Under the condition  Rin=Z/n²( generally referred as impedance matching ), the maximum gain can be expressed as;

It means that larger Z makes more efficient gain. In our case, interested Z is considered as the impedance at a resonance.

So what we should do is making a resonant circuit which has a higher impedance at the resonance (e.g. high Q-resonant circuit).

The key point of the story is:
"The recipe to exploit maximum benefit from a resonant EOM"
- Make a resonant EOM circuit. Measure the impedance Z at the resonance.
- This Z determines the optimum turn ratio n of the step-up transformer.
  (n² = Z/Rin where Rin is 50Ohm in our case.)
- This n gives the maximum gain G_max (= n/2) that can be obtained with the step up transformer.
  And, the impedance matching is also satisfied in this condition.

OK: The larger Z, the better. The higher Q, the Z larger, thus the better.
(Although the relationship between Z and Q were not described in the original post.)

So, how can we make the Q higher? What is the recipe for the resonant circuit?
=> Choose the components with smaller loss (resistance). The details will be provided by Kiwamu soon??? 

When I was young (3 months ago), I thought...

• Hey! Let's increase the Q of an EOM! It will increase the modulation!
• Hey! Let's use the step-up transformer with n as high as possible! It will increase the modulation!
• Hey! Take the impedance matching! It will increase the modulation!

I was just too thoughtless. In reality, they are closely related each other.

A high Q resonant circuit has a high residual resistance at the resonant frequency. As far as the impedance is higher than the equivalent output impedance of the driving circuit (i.e. Z>Rin n²), we get the benefit of increasing the turn ratio of the transformer. In other words, "the performance of the resonant EOM is limited by the turn ratio of the transformer." (give us more turns!)

OK. So can we increase the turn ratio infinitely? No. Once Rin n² gets larger than Z, you no longer get the benefit of the impedance transforming. The output impedance of the signal source yields too much voltage drop.

There is an optimum point for n. That is the above recipe. 

So, a low Q resonant EOM has a destiny to be useless. But high Q EOM still needs to be optimized. As far as we use a transformer with a low turn ratio, it only shows ordinary performance.

I have been working about multi-resonant EOM since last week.

In order to characterize the behavior of the each components, I have made a simple LC tank circuit.

You can see the picture of the circuit below.

Before constructing the circuit, I made an "ideal" calculation of the transfer function without any assumptions by my hand and pen.

Most difficult part in the calculation is the dealing with a transformer analytically. Eventually I found how to deal with it in the analytical calculation.

The comparison of the calculated and measured transfer function is attached.

 It shows the resonant frequency of ~50MHz as I expected. Those are nicely matched below 50MHz !!

For the next step, I will make the model of the circuit with stray capacitors, lead inductors, ... by changing the inductance or something. 

There were several small/medium earthquakes in Ridgecrest and one medium one in Blackhawk CA at about 2000 UTC (i.e. ~ 2 hours ago), one of which caused BS, ITMY, and ETM watchdogs to trip. I restored the damping just now.

I have created the attached EOM circuit with resonances at 11 MHz, 29.5 MHz, and 55 MHz (the magnitude and phase of the voltage across the EOM are shown in the attached plot). The gain is roughly the same for each resonant peak. Although I have managed to get the impedances at all of the resonant frequencies to equal each other, I am having more trouble getting the impedances to be 50 Ohms (they are currently all around 0.66 Ohms).

For the current circuit, initial calculations show that we will need around 4.7 - 14.2 A of current to drive the EOM at the desired voltage (8 - 24 V); this is much higher than the current rating of most of the available transformers (250 mA), but the necessary current will change as the impedance of the circuit is corrected, so this is probably not a cause for concern. For example, the necessary driving voltages for the current circuit are (2.8 - 8.5 V); if we assume that the 50-Ohm impedance will be purely resistive, then we get a current range of 56 - 170 mA.

Since last week, I have come up with a new circuit, which is shown in the attached figure. The magnitude (solid) and phase (dashed) of the voltage across the EOM (red), the ratio between the voltage across the EOM and the voltage across the primary nodes of the transformer (blue), and the impedance through the primary port of the transformer (red) are also shown in an attached figure. As can be seen on the plot, resonance occurs at 11 MHz, 29.5 MHz, and 55 MHz, as specified. Also, at these resonant frequencies, the impedance is about 50 Ohms (34 dB). The gain between the voltage across the EOM and the voltage across the primary nodes of the transformer (or output of the crystal oscillator) is about 12 dB; we'd like a higher gain than this, but this gain is primarily governed by the ratio between the secondary and primary inductances in the transformer, and we are using the largest available ratio (on the Coilcraft website) that has the necessary bandwidth. Because of this, we will likely have to add another component between the crystal oscillator and the EOM circuit, to get the voltage to the desired 8.5 Vp across the EOM (for an optical modulation depth of 0.1 rad).

The current and power through the primary port of the tranformer are 43-85 mA and 25-92 mW, respectively. Since the transformer ratings are 250 mA and 1/4 W for current and power; these values should be safe to use with the intended transformer. Also, the highest power dissipated by a resistor in the circuit (not including the 50 Ohm resistor that is part of the crystal oscillator setup) is around 74 mW.

This week, I've been working on adapting the last week's circuit to make it buildable. Mostly this has involved picking components that are already in the lab, adding tunable components when necessary, and planning roughly how the components should be laid out on a board. I then built the circuit and put it in a box with BNC connectors for easy connection during testing. A picture of the built circuit is attached.

For initial testing, the transformer was removed from the design; since this changed the response of the circuit, I added two resistors to correct the response. A figure showing a schematic of the built circuit is attached. The expected responce of the circuit is also shown; the magnitude (solid) and phase (dashed) of the voltage across the EOM are shown in green, and the impedance of the circuit is shown in blue. While this response has sharp peaks and 50 Ohms (34 dB) of impedance at resonances, the gain is low compared to the circuit with the transformer. This means that, as is, this circuit cannot be used to drive the EOM; it is simply for testing purposes.

This week I've been working on testing the first version of the prototype circuit. Initially, I tested the circuit that I built last week, which had resistors in the place of the transformer. The magnitude and phase of the transfer function, as measured by the Agilent 4395A, are shown in the attached plot (first plot, MeasuredTransferFunction_R.jpg). The transfer function doesn't look like the simulated transfer function (second plot, BuiltCkt_ExpectedResponse.png), but I think I see the three peaks at least (although they're at the wrong frequencies). I spent some time trying to recreate the actual transfer function using LTSpice, and I think it's reasonable that the unexpected response could be created by extra inductance, resistance, capacitance and interaction between components.

When the transformer arrived  yesterday, I replaced the resistors in the circuit with the transformer, and I have measured the following response (last plot, MeasuredTransferFunction.jpg). The gain is much lower than for the circuit with the resistors; however, I am still trying to track down loose connections, since the measured transfer function seems very sensitive to jiggled wires and connections.

Meanwhile, the parts for a flying-component prototype circuit have been ordered, and when they arrive, I'll build that to see if it works a little better.

Using FET probes, I was able to measure a transfer function that looks a little more like what I expected. There are only two peaks, but I think this can be explained by a short between the two capacitors (and two tunable capacitors) in the LC pairs, as shown (in red) in the circuit diagram attached. The measured transfer function (black), along with the simulated transfer functions with (red) and without (blue) the short are shown in the attached plot. The measured transfer function doesn't look exactly like the simulated transfer function with the short, but I think the difference can be explained by stray impedances.

I have built a version of the circuit with flying components; the completed circuit is shown in the attached picture. I built the circuit in segments and measured the transfer function after each segment to see whether it matched the LTSpice simulation after each step. The segments are shown in the circuit diagram.

After building the first segment, the measured transfer function looked pretty much the same as the simulated transfer function; it appears shifted in the attached plot, but this is because I didn't do a careful job of tuning at this point, and I'm relatively sure that I could have tuned it to match the simulation. After adding the second segment of the circuit, the measured and simulated transfer functions were similar in shape, but I was unable to increase the frequency of the peaks (through tuning) any more than what is shown in the plot (I could move the peaks so that their frequency was lower, but they are shown as high as they will go). When I added the final segment to complete the circuit, the measured and simulated transfer functions no longer had the same shape; two of the peaks were very close together and I was barely able to differentiate one from the other.

In order to understand what was happening, I tried making modifications to the LTSpice model to recreate the transfer function that was measured. I was able to create a transfer function that closely resembles the measured transfer function in both the circuit as of the 2nd segment and the completed circuit by adding extra inductance and capacitance as shown in red in the circuit diagram. The transfer functions simulated with these parasitic components are shown in red in both plots. While I was able to recreate the response of the circuit, the inductance and capacitance needed to do this were much larger than I would expect to occur naturally within the circuit (2.2uH, 12 pF). I'm not sure what's going on with this.

After speaking with Rana and realizing that it would be better to use smaller inductances in the flying-component circuit (and after a lot of tinkering with the original), I rebuilt the circuit, removing all of the resistors (to simplify it) and making the necessary inductance and capacitance changes. A picture of the circuit is attached, as is a circuit diagram.

A plot of the measured and simulated transfer functions is also attached; the general shape matches between the two, and the resonant frequencies are roughly correct (they should be 11, 29.5, and 55 MHz). The gain at the 55 MHz peak is lower than the other two peaks (I'd like them all to be roughly the same). I currently have no idea what the impedance is doing, but I'm certain it is not 50 Ohms at the resonant peaks, because there are no resistors in the circuit to correct the impedance. Next, I'll have to add the resistors and see what happens.

Stephanie, 

This is a quite nice measurement. Much better than the previous one.

1) For further steps, I think now you need to connect the real EOM at the end in order to incorporate
the capacitance and the loss (=resistance) of the EOM. Then you have to measure the input impedance
of the circuit. You can measure the impedance of the device at Wilson house.
(I can come with you in order to consult with Rich, if you like)

Before that you may be able to do a preparatory measurement which can be less precise than the Wilson one,
but still useful. You can measure the transfer function of the voltage across the input of this circuit,
and can convert it to the impedance. The calibration will be needed by connecting a 50Ohm resister
on the network analyzer.

2) I wonder why the model transfer function (TF) has slow phase changes at the resonance.
Is there any implicit resistances took into account in the model?

If the circuit model is formed only by reactive devices (Cs and Ls), the whole circuit has no place to dissipate (= no loss).
This means that the impedance goes infinity and zero, at the resonance and the anti-resonance, respectively.
This leads a sharp flip of the phase at these resonances and anti-resonances.

The real circuit has small losses everywhere. So, the slow phase change is reasonable.

For the past couple of days I have been trying to understand and perform Koji's method for impedance measurement using the Agilent 4395A Network Analyzer (without the impedance testing kit). I have made some headway, but I don't completely understand what's going on; here's what I've done so far.

I have made several transfer function measurements using the attached physical setup (ImpedanceTestingPhysicalSetup.png), after calibrating the setup by placing a 50 Ohm resistor in the place of the Z in the diagram. The responses of the various impedances I've measured are shown in the attached plot (ImpResponses.png). However, I'm having trouble figuring out how to convert these responses to impedances, so I tried to derive the relationship between the measured transfer function and the impedance by simplifying the diagram Koji drew on the board for me (attached, ImpedanceTestingSetup.png) to the attached circuit diagram (ImpedanceTestingCktDiagram.png), and finding the expected value of V_A/V_R. For the circuit diagram shown, the equation should be V_A/V_R = 2Z/(50+Z). 50 Ohms is good to use for calibration because the expected value of the transfer function for this impedance is 1 (0 dB).

So I used this relationship to find the expected response for the various impedances, and I also calculated the impedance from the actual measured responses. I've attached a plot of the measured (red) and expected (black) response (top) and impedance (bottom) for a 1 nF capacitor (1nF.png). The expected and measured plots don't really match up very well; if I add extra inductance (7.6 nH, plots shown in blue), the two plots match up a little better, but still don't match very well. I suspect that the difference may come from the fact that for my analysis, I treated the power splitter as if it were a simple node, and I think that's probably not very accurate.

Anyway, the point of all this is to eventually measure the impedance of the circuit I created on Friday, but I don't think I can really do that until I understand what is going on a little better.

 I checked the setup and found RF reflection at the load was the cause of the unreasonable response in the impedance measurement.
So, I have put a total 22dB attenuation (10+6+6 dB) between the power splitter and the load to be measured. See the picture.
This kind of attenuators, called as PADs, is generally used in order to improve the impedance matching, sacrificing the signal amplitude at the load.

Then, It looks the measurements got reasonable up to 100MHz (at least) and |Z|<1kOhm.
For the measurements, I just followed the procedure that Stephanie described.
Stephanie has measured the impedance of her resonant circuit.

As a test of the method, I measured impedances of various discrete devices. i.e. 50Ohm, 10-1000pF Cap, Inductances, circuit opened.

a) 50Ohm (marine-blue) was calibrated to be recognized as 50Ohm.

b) The mica capacitances (orange 10pF, yellow 100pF, green 1000pF) appeared as the impedances f^-1 in the low freq region. It's nice.
At high frequency, the impedances deviate from f^-1, which could be caused by the lead inductance. (Self Resonance)
So 1000pF mica is not capacitance at 50MHz already.

c) Open BNC connector (Red) looks have something like 5pF. (i.e. 300Ohm at 100MHz)

d) I could not get good measurements with the inductors as I had 200nH (and some C of ~5pF) for a Pomona clip (blue).
This is just because of my laziness such that I avoid soldering the Ls to an RF connector!