The Y arm green transmission had come down to 0.3 and the green steering mirrors on the Y end table required some minor alignment adjustments to bring back transmission to around 0.75 counts.

 We've been having trouble tuning the ALS DIFF matrix. Trying to see if the MC2 EXC can be cancelled in ALS DARM by adjusting the relative gains in ALSX and ALSY Phase Tracker outputs.

There's a bunch of intermittent behavior. Between different ALS locks, we get more or less cancellation. We were checking this by driving MC2 at ~100-400 Hz and checking the ALS response (with the ALS loops closed). We noticed that the X and Y readbacks were different by ~5-10 degrees and that we could not cancel this MC2 signal in DARM by more than a factor of 4-5 or so. In the middle of this, we had one lock loss and it came back up with 100x cancellation?

Attached is a PDF showing a swept sine measurement of the ALSX, ALSY, and DARM signals. You can see that there is some phase shift between the two repsonses leading to imperfect cancellation. Any ideas? Whitening filters? HOM resonance? Alignment?

So far today, I've been working with the Y-end green PDH locking. Using a SR560 to roll off the AG4395A output to take a loop measurement at the servo output, I measured the following OLG, and inferred the CLG from it. The SR560 really helped it getting good coherence without introducing a big offset that changes the optical gain, thus distorting the loop shape, etc. etc. 

You would think this loop looks pretty good, 10k UGF, and 45 degrees of phase margin, gain peaking is sane, and pretty smooth slope. But, the thing still was flipping out of lock while I measured this. 

I suspect shenanigans at >100k. This is motivated by the fact that I've seen some big noise in the error signal around 150k. I don't have a good noise plot right now, because I'm trying to get a scheme going where I stitch together a bunch of 1 decade spectra from the 4395, but the noise floor isn't consistent across each patch (even though the attenuation stays the same, and I confirmed I'm in "noise" mode). I'm working on a loop measurement up there, too, but I haven't been able to get the right filter/amplitude settings yet. 

So, even though this plot is not totally correct (read: wrong and bad), I include it just for the sake of showing the big honking spike of noise at ~150K.  

[ Rana, Jenne]

We remeasured the Yend PDH box.

When we first started, the green couldn't hold lock to the arm - it kept flickering between modes.  Changing the gain of the PDH box (from 7.5 to 6.0) helped.

We measured a calibration, from our injection point to our measurement point.

The concept was that we'd take the mixer output, and put that into an SR560, and put the swept sine injection into the other input port of the '560, and use A-B.  So, for this calibration, we left A unplugged, and just had the RF out of the 4395 going to input B of the '560.  The 600 Ohm output of the '560 went to the error point input on the PDH box (during normal operation the mixer output is connected directly to the error point input).  The SR560 was set to gain of 1, no filtering.  I don't recall if we were using high range or low noise, but we tried both and didn't really see a difference between them.

We had the 4395 take that calibration out, and then we measured the closed loop gain up to 1 MHz. (Same measurement setup as above, but we connected the mixer out to the input of the SR560 to close the loop, and made sure we were locked on a TEM00 green mode.) Rana used an ipython notebook to infer the open loop gain from our measurement.  Our conclusion is that we don't have nearly enough gain margin in our loop.  We found the PDH box gain knob at 7.5, and we turned it down to 6.0, but the loop is still pretty borderline. We used the high impedance active probe to measure the error point monitor, since we aren't sure that that point can drive a 50 Ohm load.

We also measured the error point spectra and the control point spectra.  Unfortunately, the saved data from the analyzer (no matter what is on the screen) comes out in spectrum, not spectral density.  So, we need to check our conversion, but right now to get from Watts power to Volts, we do sqrt(50 ohm * data).  We then need to get to spectral density, and right now we're just dividing by the square root of the bandwith that is reported in the .par file. This last step is the one we want to especially check, by perhaps putting some known amount of noise (from an SR785?) into the 4395, and checking that our calibration math returns the expected noise spectrum.

What still needs to be done is to calibrate this into Hz/rtHz.  To do this, we were thinking that we should look at the error point on a 'scope while the cavity is flashing.

Anyhow, here is the uncalibrated error point spectrum.  Purple is a measurement up to 30kHz, with 30Hz bandwidth.  Blue is a measurement up to 300kHz with 300Hz bandwidth.  The gain peaking schmutz above 10kHz sucks, and we'd like to get rid of it.  We also see the same peak at ~150kHz that Q saw earlier today.  We were using the high impedance probe here too.

 We have the data for the control point (all the data files are in /users/jenne/ALS/PDHloops/Yend_18Aug2014), but we haven't plotted it yet.

Things that need doing:

* (JCD) Think about this box's purpose in life.  What kind of gain do we need?  Do we need more / less than we're currently getting? NPRO freq noise is 1/f and is 10kHz/rtHz at 1Hz (this is from a plot of an iLIGO NPRO from Rana's thesis, but it's probably similar). Talk to Kiwamu; the noise budget in the paper seems to indicate that we had some kind of boost on or something.  Also, if we need much more gain than we already have, we'll definitely need a different box, maybe the PDH2 box that they have over in WBridge.

* (EQ, priority 1) Measure and calibrate error point noise down to lower freq for both arms.  What could we win by putting in a boost? If the residual noise is high, maybe the laser isn't good at following arm, so beatnote isn't good length info for the arm, and we can't succeed.

* (EQ, priority 2) Measure TF of PDH box, and a separate measurement of the Pomona box that is between the mixer and the error point - is that eating a bunch of phase?  It's already an LC circuit which is good, but do we really want a 120kHz lowpass when our modulation frequency is roughly 200kHz?  Ask ChrisW - he worked on one of these with Dmass.

* (EQ, priority 2ish) Measure TF of Xend PDH loop (unless you already have one, up to ~1MHz).

* (JCD) Make DCC tree leaf for PDH box #17.  Take photos of box.

Heading to dinner, going to come back for more green fun, but here's a quick update:

Xarm Peak-to-Peak of the PDH signal in the mixer output is about 70mV when GTRX was about 0.4. The sideband-generating function generator has an output of 2V (forgot to note rms or pp)

Yarm Peak-to-Peak of the PDH signal in the mixer output is about 640uV when GTRX was about 0.71. The sideband-generating function generator has an output of 0.091V (forgot to note rms or pp)

The Yarm signal thus correspondingly has a waaay noisier trace. I would've had scope plots to show here, but the scope freaked out about how large my USB drive capacity was and refused to talk to it >:|

This suggests to me that our modulation depth for the Yarm may be much too small, and may be part of our problems with it. 

 Here is a plot of last night's data with both the control and the error point on the same plot, in Volts.  Q is still working, so I don't have a calibration number yet to get these to Hz.

Note in the control spectrum that we have very significant 60Hz lines.  

EDIT:  I also added a new branch to the DCC Document Tree, and 2 leafs (one for each end).  Here's the ALS PDH servo branch: E1400350

It's not so impressive yet, but here's a plot that shows (a) Rana's guess for laser frequency noise, (b) The inferred in-loop version of that noise, (c) The CARM linewidth FWHM, translated to Hz.

For (b), I take the loop that Rana and I measured last night, and I assumed that it continued on forever as 1/f toward low frequency.  Then I do 1/(1+G) to get the closed loop version of the loop (which is a measurement with an artificial line tacked on the end), and multiply this with the laser freq noise, which is also totally artificial.

For (c), I do df/f = dL/L, with f = c/lambda_green, since the rest of the plot is meant to be in green frequency units.

This is my beginnings of trying to come up with a requirement for our green PDH boxes.  We weren't very clear in the MultiColor paper about the nitty-gritty details (obviously), but then Kiwamu didn't expand on those details in his thesis either.  He talks a lot more about the design considerations for the digital ALS loop, which isn't what I want today.  I will send him an email to see if he had any notes that didn't make it into his thesis.

I've made a whole bunch of measurements on the Xarm green situation.

TL;DRs:

• GTRX was around 0.55 for all of the measurements tonight. 
• Based on where I saw gain peaking in the CLG, it looked like UGF was 1-2kHz. I cranked the gain to 10kHz, ~20dB gain peaking followed, making it hard to measure. Currently sitting at 5kHz-ish. 
• Measured CLG with AG4395A, calibrated for injection point response, inferred OLG. 
• Took various PSDs, still need to calibrate into physically meaningful units. 

Reasonable amounts of time were spent bending the AG4395 to my will; i.e. figuring out the calibration things Jenne and Rana did, finding the right excitation amplitude and profile that would leave the light steadily locked, and finding the right GPIB incantation for getting spectra in PSD units instead of power units. I'm nearing completion of a newer version of AG4395 scripts that have proper units, and pseudo-log spectra (i.e. logarithmically spaced linear sweeps)

Transfer functions

Here is too many traces on one plot showing parts of the OLTF for the x green PDH. One notable omission is the PD response (note to self:check model and bandwidth). The servo oddly seems to have a notch around 100k. My calibration for the CLG injection may not have been perfect, instead of flattening out at 0dB, I had 2dB residual. I tried to correct for it after the fact, assuming that certain regions were truly flat at 0dB, but I want to revisit it to be thorough. I found some old measurements of the Innolight PZT PM response, which claims to be in rad/V, and have included that on the plot. 

In the end, the mixer and PZT response make it look like getting over 10kHz bandwidth may be tough. Even finding a good higher modulation frequency to be able to scoot the LP up would leave us with the sharp slope in the PZT phase loss, and could cause bad gain peaking. Maybe it's worth thinking about a faster way of modulating the green light?

Noise Spectra

Tomorrow morning, I'll calibrate all the noise spectra I have into real units. These include:

• In loop error signal and control signal spectra
• Mixer output spectrum when PD is dark, and when mixer input is terminated
• Servo out spectrum when PD is dark, and when servo input is terminated

However, looking at the floors, it occurs to me that I may have left the attenuation on the input too high, in an effort to protect the input the PDH box, which rails all the time when not locked to a 00 mode, sometimes even with the input terminated or open. It's kind of a pain that the agilent makes it really hard to see the data when you're in V/rtHz mode, because I should've caught this while measuring :/

I used a scope to capture a pdh signal happening, which will let me transform the mixer output into cavity motion. The control signal goes to the innolight PZT with a ~1MHz/V factor. Here are the uncalibrated plots, for now. 

A MIST simulation tells me that the green pdh horn-to-horn displacement is about 1.2nm, or ~18kHz. I used this, along with the scope trace attached to the previous post, to calibrate the mixer output at 193419 Hz per V. (EDIT: I was a little too hasty here. What I'm really after is the slope of the zero crossing, which turns out to be almost exactly twice my earlier naïve estimate. See later post for correct spectra)

For the control signal, I assumed a flat Innolight PZT PM response of 1MHz/V. ( Under 10kHz, it is indeed flat, and this is the region where the control signal is above the servo output noise in yesterday's measurements)

Here are all of the same spectra from last night, with the above calibrations. 

Going off Jenne's earlier plot, it looks like the in-loop error signal RMS is ten times bigger than the CARM linewidth. 

 I calibrated the control signal from Volts to Hz using the rough PZT calibration of 5MHz/V for the Yend NPRO.  

For the error signal, Q said that the Yarm PDH peak-to-peak height was about a factor of 100 smaller than the Xarm, so I used a calibration of 1.9e7 Hz / V.

Then, from Q's Mist simulation including the high Xarm loss, and the plot that he posted in the control room, the CARM linewidth looks like it is about 2pm.  This is the number that I have included on today's plot.  Note though that yesterday I was using a linewidth of about 30pm, which I got from an Optical simulation about a year ago.  I do not know why these numbers come out an order of magnitude different!      The CARM linewidth is actually about 20 pm.  Both Q and I failed at reading log-x plots yesterday.  I have corrected this, and replotted.

Anyhow, here's the Yarm noise spectra calibrated plot:

I have emailed Kiwamu, but haven't heard back from him yet on what the original design considerations were, if he remembered us ever using a boost, etc.  What this looks like to me is that we need to do some serious work to get the noise down.  Maybe fixing the gain peaking and triggering the boost will get us most of the way there?

I remeasured all of the noise spectra again today, making sure the input attenuation was as low as it could safely be. I also got a snap of the y green PDH signal; it's fairly larger than I saw the other day, which is good. I used this to calibrate the error signal voltage spectra. 

Here are the noise traces for each arm. During these measurements GTRX was about .6, GTRY about 1.0 The Yarm noise doesn't look so good: the error signal is just barely above the mixer+lowpass output noise, and the RMS is plauged by 60Hz lines. (Is this related to what we see in IR TRY sometimes?)

Here are the arms error signals compared directly:

[rana, ericq]

We spent time trying to relieve the Yend green PDH of it troubles. 

We realized that the mixer in the PDH setup (mini circuits ZAD-8+), wants 7dBm of LO to properly function. However, we use one function generators output, through a splitter, to give signals to the laser PZT and the mixer LO. 

We don't want 7dBm of power hitting the laser PZT, though. The summing node that adds the servo output to the sideband signal was supposedly designed to do some of this attenuation. Rana measured that 10Vpp out of the function generator resulted in 20mVpp on the fast input to the NPRO, after the summing node. Hence, the 0.09V setting was only resulting in something like 0.2mV hitting the PZT. The PZT has something like 30 rad/V PM response, meaning we only had ~0.006 rad of modulation. 

Now, the function generator is set to 2 Vpp, meaning 4 mVpp hitting the PZT, meaning ~0.12 radians of modulation. The mixer is now getting +7dBm on its LO, and the PDH traces look much cleaner. However, the PDH error signal is now something like 100mVpp, which is much bigger than the PDH board is designed for, so there is now a 10dB attenuator between the reflection PD DC block and the RF input to the mixer. 

Here are screenshots of the Inmon channel (which has a gain of ~20) showing a sweep through some PDH signal, and the error signal while in green lock. Huge 60Hz harmonics are still observed. 

Regarding these 60Hz issues, we need to make sure that we remove all situations where long BNCs are chained together with barrel connectors, or Ts are touching other ones. We also should glue or affix the pomona summing box to the shelf, so that its not just laying on the floor.

The concrete next step is to go fiddle with things, and see if we can get the 60Hz noise to go away, then measure the PDH loop and noises again. Hopefully, this should make the ALS much more reliable. 

I found that the barrel of one the BNC to BNC connectors used for getting the output of the PDH servo box to the laser controller was touching the ETMY chamber. When I held it away, all of the 60Hz harmonics disappeared from the mixer output spectrum; this was pretty repeatable. This inspired me to replace the refl PD and PZT signal cables (which were 2 and 3 cables stitched together, respectively) with 20' long BNCs. I also cleaned up a lot of the routing of signal and power cables in the little rack, and moved the big T->DC Block->Attenuator combo off of the panel mount, because I didn't like how it was wiggling. It and the summing pomona box are sitting on top of the PDH box and function generator, instead of hanging freely.

All of the 60Hz harmonics were banished afterwards, and the green locked happily. 

This required me touching the Y end table, to remove the old cable and its cable ties, and putting the new one in. I don't think I did anything immediately apparently bad; the green and IR transmissions both are within nominal ranges. 

I haven't had luck measuring the CLG yet, which I wanted to do to get and set the UGF before measuring the noises. However, here is a scope trace of the in-lock error signal, which compares quite favorably to the trace posted in the previous post; the scope indicates that the signal has 1/3 of the RMS that it did before I replaced the cables. 

I hope to measure up the current status after I get back from dinner. 

 Yesterday I measured the spectra and OLTF of the Y-Arm green PDH, after the LO touch-up and 60Hz hunt from last week. I also went to lower frequencies with the SR785, but forgot to take some of the background spectra down there, so I don't have the full breakdown plots yet. Nevertheless, here is the improvement in the PDH error signal:

I also measured the OLTF (SR785 injection at the error signal, Auto level ref 5mV at channel 2, 10mV/s source ramping, 50mV max output)

As you can see, we have tons of phase margin. Flipping the local boost switch had no visible effect on the OLTF; we should change it to something that puts this surplus of phase to good use, and squash the error signal even more. Putting an integrator at 5kHz should still leave about 45 degrees phase margin at 10k. I've started making a LISO model of the PDH board from the DCC drawing, and then I'll inspect the boards individually to make sure I catch the homegrown modifications. 

Data, and code used to generate the plots is attached. 

 Quick post of plots and data; I'll fill in more detail tonight. 

TL;DR: I pulled both green PDH boxes and made LISO models, compared TFs and noise levels. 

Pictures of X and Y boards, respectively

TF comparison to LISO. (Normalized to coincide at 1Hz)

Noise comparison to LISO

To Do:

• Figure out why TFs were made differently. Check PM response curves of PZTs to see if they are fine, or need tweaking.
• Make boosts useful. Both are currently integrators with corners under 10Hz, which is already pretty suppressed. 
• I just noticed that the X board is missing C25, which should be a 1uF cap on the positive power pin of the primary TF stage opamp. This should be inserted. 

All data, EAGLE schematics, LISO source and plots in the attached zip. 

I had noticed in the past, that the digital control signal monitor for the X end would saturate well before the ADC should saturate (C1:ALS-X_SLOW_SERVO_IN1, which is from the "output mon" BNC on the box). It turns out that there is some odd saturation happening inside the box itself.

In this scope trace, the servo input is being driven with a 0.02Vpp, 0.1Hz sine wave, gain knob at 1.0. This is bad. 

Evan and I poked around the board, and discover that for some reason currently unknown to us, the variable gain amplifier (AD8336) can't reach its negative rail, despite the +-12V arriving safely at its power supply pins. 

I also realized that the LF356 in the integrator stage in this box had been replaced with a LT1792 by Kiwamu in ELOG 4373. I've updated my schematic, and will upload both boxes' schematics to the DCC page Jenne created for them. (D1400293 and D1400294)

 I've been having trouble locking the X - green for the past few hours. Has there been some configuration change down there that anyone knows about?

I'm thinking that perhaps I need to replace the SHG crystal or perhaps remove the PZT alignment mirrors perhaps. Another possibility is that the NPRO down there is going bad. I'll start swapping the Y-end NPRO for the X-end one and see if that makes things better.

I had pulled out both X and Y servo boxes for inspection, put the Y box back, soldered in a missing op amp power capacitor on the X end box, and had not yet put back the X end box yet because of the saturation issue I was looking into. Otherwise nothing was changed at the ends; I didn't open the tables at all, or touch laser/SHG settings, just unplugged the servo boxes. 

I narrowed down the saturation point in the X green PDH box to the preamp inside the AD8336, but there is still no clear answer as to why it's happening. 

As per Jenne's request, I put the X end PDH box back for tonight's work. It locks, but we have an artificially low actuation range. With SR785, I confirmed a PDH UGF around 5k. Higher than that, and I couldn't reliably measure the UGF due to SR560 saturations. The analyzer is not currently in the loop. 

Both arms lock to green, but I haven't looked at beatnotes today. 

What monitor point is being plotted here? Or is it a scope probe output?

If this saturation is in the uPDH-X but not in the uPDH-Y, then just replace the VGA chip. Because these things have fixed attenuation inside, they often can't go the rails even when the chip is new.

In any case, we need to make a fix to get this box on the air in a fixed state before tomorrow evening.

The traces were from the front panel output BNCs, but the VGA preamp exhibited this asymmetric saturation at its output.  

In any case, I tried to replace the Xend box's AD8336 with a new one, and in doing so, did some irreparable damage to the traces on the board  I was not able to get a new AD8336 into the board. There are some ATF ELOGs where Zach found the AD8336 noise to be bad at low frequencies (link), and its form factor is totally unsuitable for any design that may involve hand modification, since it doesn't even have legs, just tiny little pads. I suggest we never use it for anything in the future. 

Instead, I've hacked on a little daughter board with an OP27 as an inverting op-amp with the gain resistor on the front panel as its feedback resistor, which can swing from 0 to x20 gain (the old gain setting was around 15dB=~x6). I've checked out the TF and output noise, and they look ok. The board can output both rails as well. 

I don't really like this as a long term solution, but I didn't want to leave things in a totally broken state when I left for dinner. 

Just a quick note, plots and data will come tomorrow:

I grabbed an unused uPDH board from the ATF (thanks Zach!), and re-stuffed almost the entire thing to match Jenne's latest schematic for the y end box. I also threw some 22uF caps on the regulators, as Koji did with the previous box, to eliminate some oscillations up in the high 10s of kHz. I replaced the tragedy of a box that I created on Wednesday with this new box. The arm locks pretty stably with the boost on, 30 degrees of phase margin with 10kHz UGF, and locks pretty darn reliably. 

Now we should now have two nicely boosted PDH loops. I'll do a noise/loop breakdown again in the upcoming days. 

 I measured the noise spectra and loop TF of the green PDH with the newly stuffed board. Unfortunately, I never took the noise below 100Hz of the previous box, so we can't see what has happened to the overall RMS, or more specifically, the RMS due to the pendulum resonance. All of these plots are in the boosted state, as that is how we intend to use the box. 

Here is the loop, which does not have quite as much margin as the y-arm, but 10dB of gain peaking is probably ok, since the RMS at 10s of kHz is not so important to ALS. (OL measured, CL inferred)  We see the 1/f shape from 1k to 50k or so, and 1/f^2 under 1k, as desired. 

Comparing in the in loop error signals, we see the effect from the increased gain from 100Hz to 10kHz. (Here is where I regret not looking at the low frequency spectrum two weeks ago)

Finally, here is the noise breakdown. 

The error signal RMS is now dominated by the 1Hz peak. We have talked about using digital feedback for this, since we have the PDH error signal coming into an ADC, and can sum in a DAC signal into the servo output. This also lets us intelligently trigger a sub-10Hz boost once the PDH box locks itself. With a good boost, we maybe could bring the in-loop RMS of the error signal to under 1kHz. 

Something odd that Rana brought to my attention, however, is that my measurement and calibration indicates an RMS of ~5kHz, but the cavity pole should be something like 18kHz. If this is true, how can we be seeing stable power? This maybe means that my calibration is too many Hz per Volt.

I performed the calibration by creating a MIST model of the arm, and generating the PDH error signal on a demodulated PD, I then find the slope of Hz per arbitrary error signal unit. Then, looking at a scope trace, I match up the horn-to-horn voltage to the horn-to-horn arbitrary error signal units, which lets me finally find Hz per error signal volt. 

However, there is some qualitative difference in the shape between the simulated and observed error signals, namely, that the outer horns are larger than the inner horns in the real signal. 

Does this matter? Is there something in my simulation that I can correct that would give a more accurate calibration? 

Data, plots, code, attached. 

 What modulation depth are you using for the simulation? I have never seen a real measurement of that in our elog for the end-PDH systems.

I also disbelieve your RMS calculations. It looks like in the 1.5-0.5 Hz band we're picking up 50 kHz of frequency noise even though the 1 Hz peak is only 80 Hz/rHz, even though math says  "80 * sqrt(1) = 80".

Take a look at:

http://www.mathwords.com/r/root_mean_square.htm

and

http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~rana/mat/utilities/rms.m

I used a modulation depth of 0.3, which, if I recall correctly, is what we aimed for on the Y-arm when we adjusted the LO signal there. However, this is probably not the case for the X arm. 

In any case, I found the bug in my RMS calculation. (I had forgotten to flip the x array in addition to the y array for the right-to-left integration, and had uneven bin spacing, so the integration bandwidths weren't correct...)

Here are the updated plots. The properly evaluated RMS is ~600Hz, which seems to mostly come in around 10k, so we may want to turn down the gain for less gain peaking in that region. 

600 Hz seems ~OK. From the measured reflectivities for 532 nm, the green Finesse = 108. So the green cavity pole should be 18.3 kHz given an arm length of 37.8 m. 

600 Hz of green frequency noise means that we would get 38 pm RMS of arm mirror motion. We should assumed a peak/RMS factor of 10, so this would allow us to get to ~0.4 nm CARM offset.

However, its better than that. What we really care about for ALS is the amount of this green frequency noise which is put onto the arm. With an ALS feedback bandwidth of 100 Hz, my eyeball estimate say that the contribution from green PDH error will be ~100 Hz RMS, since we don't care too much about the 10 kHz stuff. So this seems good enough for now; let's figure out what's up with PDH-Y and get back to locking.

These are plots and notes from last week's PDH adventures. 

For the PDH servo box re-design, we wanted to think a little bit about what we actually wanted out of the box.

* We want the zero of the main transfer function to be at the same frequency as the cavity pole for green, which is about 18kHz.

* We want the boost to suppress noise at a few hundred Hz.  We don't need super-duper low-frequency boost, nor do we want it.  We'd like to leave the boost on all the time.

* Wanted to get rid of 10dB attenuator on PD input, so needed to lower the overall gain.

* We acknowledge that the gain of the raw error signal times the PZT response is very high, so no matter what, we will have to have a low-gain servo, even perhaps have the servo shape be less than unity gain.

---> We reduced the gain of the first amplification stage from a gain of 20 to a gain of 3.

---> Made the boost stage have a DC gain of 1.  Pole at 75 Hz and Zero at 1.6kHz to give suppression at a few hundred Hz.  Boost is *not* a pure integrator, so that we can leave it on.  (If we required triggering anyway, we would have made it a pure integrator).

---> In transfer function stage, put zero at 17.7kHz to match cavity pole.  Pole of servo was going to be at 20 Hz, but we wanted a little more gain, so we lowered it to 2 Hz.

Here is the final measured servo box transfer function for the Yend box (with an arbitrary gain knob setting):

Once installed, I set the gain knob for the Yend at 4.0, which gave an overall UGF of about 10kHz.  Then I measured the loop:

I also measured the error point and the control point, and compared them to Q's measurements in elog 10430.

In order to see what we might expect for a contribution to ALS noise, I looked at the error point spectra and lowpassed it with a pole at 200Hz.  I do this because the PDH error is like sensor noise for the ALS, but the ALS UGF is around 200 Hz, so noise at frequencies higher than that will be suppressed like 1/f.  So, I lowpass the error signal, then look at the RMS, and see that we should be pretty happy with our result. I include also the Xend error spectrum, as measured and reported by Q in elog 10460.

Summary: Cannot find beatnotes between the arms and PSL.

I wanted to measure the ALS out of loop noise before putting stuff on the PSL table for frequency offset locking.

But I was not able to find the beat notes between the arms and PSL green. All I could find while scanning through the end laser temperatures is the beatnote between the X and Y green.

EricQ says that he spent some time yesterday and could not find the beatnotes as well.

Debugging and still could not find:

1. Checked the FSS slow actuator. This was close to zero ~0.003

2. Checked the green alignment on the PSL table. Everything seems fine.

3. Checked the actual PSL laser temperature. It was 31.28deg and not very far from when it was last set at 31.33deg elog.

4. Also checked the end laser temperatures. Both the lasers are ~40deg (where I could see the beatnote between the arms). Based on the plot here and  here , we are very much in the regime where there should be a beatnote between the PSL and the arms.

I have been looking at the X-end ALS setup.
I was playing with the control bandwidth to see the effect to the phase tracker output (i.e. ALS err).
For this test the arm was locked with the IR and the green beat note was used as the monitor.

From the shape of the error signal, the UGF of the green PDH was ~10kHz. When I increased the gain
to make the servo peaky, actually the floor level of the ALS err became WORSE. I did not see any improvement
anywhere. So, high residual error RMS cause some broadband noise in the ALS??? This should be checked.
Then when the UGF was lowered to 3kHz, I could see some bump at 3kHz showed up in the ALS error.
I didn't see the change of the PSD below 1kHz. So, more supression of the green PDH does not help
to improve the ALS error?

Then, I started to play with the phase tracker. It seems that someone already added the LF booster
to the phase tracker servo. I checked the phase tracker error  and confirmed it is well supressed.
Further integrator does not help to reduce the phase tracker error.

For the next thing I started to change the offset of the phase tracker. This actually changes
the ALS error level! The attached plot shows the dependence of the ALS error PSD on the phase tracker
output. At the time of this measurement, the offset of -10 exhibited the best noise level.
This was, indeed, factor of 3~5 improvement compared to the zero offset case below 100Hz.

I'm afraid that this offset changes the beat frequency as I had the best noise level at the offset of -5
with a different lock streatch. We should look at this more carefully. If the beat freq changes the offset,
this give us another reason to fix the beat frequency (i.e. we need the frequency control loop.

= Today's ALSX error would have not been the usual low noise state.
We should recover the nominal state of the ALS and make the same test =

Because the ALS beatbox schematic is out-of-date and misleading, we pulled the box to photograph the current implementation and figure out how to proceed. The box is out on the EE bench right now. Schematic Doc added to 40m Document tree: https://dcc.ligo.org/LIGO-D1102241. Some notes:

1. The soldering on this board is pretty messy and there are a lot of flying wire and flying component hacks. I wouldn't trust all of the connections.
2. The GV-81 RF amps in the front end are both stuffed. The 1 dB compression point is 19 dBm, so we want to use them below 10 dBm output. They have a gain of +10.5 dB, so that means they should not be used with and input to the beatbox of more than -10 dBm. Otherwise there will be nonlinear noise generation.
3. Not stuffed: U1-Comparator, A1-attenuator, U2-splitter.
4. Why is the filter after the mixer only 2nd order?? That's not a valid filter choice in any RF world. How much do we want to cut off the 2f mixer output before sending into our low noise, audio frequency (and prone to downconversion) amplifier? The Mini-Circuits amplifiers would have given us >60 dB attenuation in the stop band. This one is only going to give us 20-30 dB when the beat frequency is low. Get rid of diplexer. The schematic claims that its just one pole?? Seems like a 2nd order LP filter to me.
5. The modified schematic (see Koji elog 8855) shows that an OP27 is used for the whitening stage. The current noise of the OP27 with the 3k resistor makes the OP27 current noise dominate below 1 Hz. And what is going on with that filter capacitor choice? We never want to use these tiny things for sensitive filter applications. (cf. Sigg doc on resistor and capacitor choice, the noise reduction book by Ott, H&H, etc.). That's why we have the larger metal-poly, paper, mylar, etc. caps sitting around.

Probably we ought to install a little daughter board to avoid having to keep hacking this dead horse. Koji has some of Haixing'g maglev filter boards. Meanwhile Koji is going to make us a new beatbox circuit in Altium and we can start fresh later this summer.

Interesting link on new SMD cap technology.

Photos of circuit as found

We had decided a few days ago, to bypass the IF part of the BeatBox board and put some of the Haixing Maglev generic filter boards in there so that we could get more whitening and also have it be low noise.

Tonight we wondered if we can ditch the whole BeatBox and just use the quad aLIGO demod box (D0902745) that Rich gave us a few years ago. Seems like it can.

But, it has no whitening. Can we do the whitening part externally? Perhaps we can run the RF signals from the output of the beat RF Amps over to the LSC rack and then put the outputs into the LSC Whitening board and acquire the signals in the LSC ?

I like this idea; it gives us more control over the whitening, and saves the IPC delay. We could use the currently vacant AS165 and POP55 channels. 

We'd only have to move the phase trackers to c1lsc, which means 12 more FMs total. This is really the only part of the c1als model our current system uses, the rest is from before the ALS->LSC integration. 

[Koji Gautam]

The variable delay line has been setup for practical use. The hardware and basic software are ready.

The delay time is given by [512-1-mod(C1:LSC-BO_1_0_SET, 512)]*(1/16) ns

Giving 511 (LLLL LLLH HHHH HHHH) to C1:LSC-BO_1_0_SET makes the delayline shortest (+0ns).
Giving 0 (LLLL LLLL LLLL LLLL) to C1:LSC-BO_1_0_SET makes the delayline longest (~32ns).

The SR785 was removed from the rack for our access >> Eric

DO setup

- Three CONTEC DO-32L-PE cards are found in the Yarm digital cabinet. (I brought a card from WB, but will bring it back).
- The card was installed in the C1LSC chassis.

- The models for c1x04 and c1lsc were modified to include the card. Once they are restarted, the card was recognized without problem.
  The frame builder also needed to be restarted (Attachment 1&2). The changes were committed to the repository.

- MEDM screen "CDS_BO_STATUS.adl" has been modified to include the bit monitors for the new DO card. (Attachment 3)

Epics values "C1:LSC-BO_1_0_SET" and "C1:LSC-BO_1_1_SET" are hooked up to the DO block.

Cables

- The DO board has DB37(F). I made a I/F cable with a DB37(M) crimp connector, DB25 breakout board, and a ribbon cable.
  Pin 1 is connected to pin 14 of the DB25 (GND of the delayline circuit).
  Pin 2~10 are connected to pin 1~9 of the DB25 (Switch 1~9 of the delayline circuit)
  Pin 18 is connected to X01 (external = spare) (Attachment 4)
 

- [CONFESSION] A bench +15V power supply was prepared to power the transisters of the DO (Attachment 6). The hot side is connected to X01 (not connected to the DB25),
  and the cold side is connected to pin 14 of the DB25. Once we find this is a useful setup we need to make a dedicated interface unit to convert DB37
  into DB25 (and provide more connectivities).

- A DB25 M-F cable was installed on the cable tray above the LSC racks.

Delay line unit

- The delay line box was mounted on 34H of the LSC analog rack (Attachment 5).

- The side cross connect power supply was not available (to be described later). Therefore we decided to use the same +15V supply as the one for the DO card.

- Checked the functionarity of the local switches using a function generator @30MHz and the front panel switches. The maximum (~32ns) delay was confirmed.
  (Just not enough to have 360 deg shift).

- Now the delay line function was tested with the front panel swicth at "ext". We confirmed that the delay time changes with the number given to C1:LSC-BO_1_0_SET.

What we need further

- Implement delay time slider control (511 = 0ns, 0 = 31.94ns). The delay time is given by
  [512-1-mod(C1:LSC-BO_1_0_SET, 512)]*(1/16) ns

- Some independent RF issues I found. (Next entry)

I began my attempts to characterize the PDH loops at the X end today. My goal was to make the following measurements:

• Dark noise and shot noise of the PD
• Mixer noise
• Servo electronics noise 

which I can then put into my simulink noise-budget scheme for the proposed IR beat setup.

I've made an Optickle model of a simple FP cavity and intend to match the measured PDH error signal from the X end to the simulated error signal to get the Hz/V calibration. I'll put the plots up for these shortly.

With regards to the other measurements, I was slowed down by remote data-acquisition from the SR785 - I've only managed to collect the analyzer noise floor data, and I plan to continue these measurements during the day tomorrow. 

Summary:

I measured the PZT actuator gain for the Lightwave NPRO at the Y-end to be 3.6 +/- 0.3 MHz/V. This is somewhat lower than the value of 5 MHz/V reported here, but I think is consistent with that measurement. 

Details:

In order to calibrate the Y-axis of my Aux PDH loop noise budget plots, I wanted a measurement of the end laser actuator gain. I proceeded to measure this as follows:

1. Use a function generator to add a DC offset to the error point - I did this by taking the output of the RF mixer -> Input A of an SR560, output of the function generator -> input B of the SR560 (via a 20 Ohm attenuator, and with a 50ohm T-eed to the input for impedance matching), and setting the output to A-B, and feeding that to the "Servo Input" on the PDH box.
2. I then locked the arm to IR, ran the dither to maximize the green transmission, and set up a beat note at ~39 MHz with the help of the analyzer in the control room.
3. Set phase tracker UGF, clear phase history.
4. Vary the DC offset to the error point by using the offset on the function generator. I varied the offset until the green TEM00 lock was lost, in steps of 0.1 V. At each step, I averaged the output of the phase tracker for 15 seconds.
5. Convert the applied DC offset to the DC offset appearing at the servo output using the transfer function of the servo box (DC gain measured to be ~65 dB), taking into account the 20dB attenuator also.

The attached plot shows the measured data. The X-axis is shown after the conversion mentioned in the last bullet point. The error bars are the standard deviations of the averaging at each DC offset. 

To do:

1. The value of the DC gain of the servo, 65 dB, is an approximate one based on a rough measurement I did earlier today. I'll take a TF measurement with an SR785 tomorrow, but I think this shouldn't change the number too much.
2. Upload the noise budget measurements for the Y-end PDH loop.

Summary:

After the discussions at the Wednesday meeting, I redid this measurement using a sinusoidal excitation summed at the error-point of the PDH servo as opposed to a DC offset. From the data I collected, I measured the actuator gain to be 2.43 +/- 0.04 MHz/V. This is almost half the value we expect, I'm not sure if I'm missing something obvious.

Details:

1. Attachment #1 is a sketch of the measurement setup and points at which signals are measured/calculated. Some important changes:
   • I am now using the channel C1:ALS-Y_ERR_MON_OUT to directly measure the input signal to the servo. In order to get the calibration constant for this channel from counts to volts, I simply hooked up the input to the channel to an oscilloscope and noted the amplitude of the signal seen on the scope in volts. The number I have used is 52uV/count (note that the signal to the ADC is amplified by a factor of 10 by an SR560).
   • I measured the transfer function from the input to the servo (marked "A" in the sketch) to the output of the Pomona box going to the laser PZT (marked "B" on the sketch) using an SR785 - see Attachment #2. This allowed me to convert the amplitude of excitation at A to an amplitude at B, which is what we need, as we want to measure C/B.
2. The measurement itself was done by locking the arms to IR, running ASS to maximize IR transmission, setting up a green beat note, and then measuring the two channels of interest with the excitation to the error-point on. 
3. I was initially trying to use time-series plots to measure these amplitudes - Koji suggested I use the Fourier domain instead, and so I took FFTs of the two channels we are interested in (using a flat-top window with 0.1 Hz BW) and estimated the RMS values at the frequency at which I had injected an excitation. Data+code used is in Attachment #3. In particular, I was integrating the PSD over 1Hz centered at the excitation frequency in order to calculate the RMS power at the excitation frequency - it could be that for C1:ALS-BEATY_FINE_PHASE_OUT_HZ, the spectral leakage into neighbouring bins is more significant than for C1:ALS-Y_ERR_MON_OUT (see Attachment #4)?
4. With the amplitudes thus obtained, I took the ratio C/B (see sketch) to determine the MHz/V actuator gain. I had injected excitations at 5 frequencies (916Hz, 933Hz, 977Hz, 1030Hz and 1067Hz, choses in relatively "quiet" parts of the spectrum of C1:ALS-Y_ERR_MON_OUT with no excitations), and the result reported is the average from these five measurements, while the error is the standard deviation in the 5 measurements.
5. Unrelated to this meaurement - while I had the SR560 hooked up to the input of the PDH box, I inverted the mixer output to the servo input, as I thought I could use this method to estimate the modulation depth. I did so by locking the Y arm green to the sideband TEM00 mode, and comparing the green transmission in this state to that when the Y arm is locked to a carrier TEM00 mode. I averaged C1:ALS-TRY_OUT for 10 seconds in 3 cases: (i) Carrier TEM00, (ii)sideband TEM00, and (iii) shutter closed - from this measurement, I estimate the modulation depth to be 0.209 +/- 0.006 (errors used to calculate the total error were the standard deviations of the measured transmission). 

Next steps:

1. Check that I have not missed out anything obvious in estimating the actuator gain - particularly the spectral leakage bit I mentioned above.
2. If this methodology and measurement is legitimate, repeat for the X end, and complete the noise budgeting for both AUX PDH loops.

Summary:

I've attached the results from my measurements of the noise characteristics of the Y-end auxiliary PDH system.

Details:

The following spectra were measured, in the range DC-1MHz:

1. Analyzer noise floor (measured with input terminated)
2. Green REFL PD dark noise (measured with the Y-end green shutter closed)
3. Mixer noise (measured with input to mixer terminated - measured with an SR560 with a gain of 100)
4. Servo noise (measured with input to servo terminated)
5. In loop error signal (measured with green locked to Y-arm, LSC off - using monitor point on PDH box)
6. In loop control signal (measured with green locked to Y-arm, LSC off - using monitor point on PDH box)

In order to have good spectral resolution, the frequency range was divided into 5 subsections: DC-200Hz, 200Hz-3.4kHz, 3.4kHz-16.2kHz, 10kHz-100kHz, 100kHz-1MHz. The first three are measured using the SR785, while the last two ranges are measured with the Agilent network analyzer. The spectrum of the mixer output with its input terminated was quite close to the analyzer noise floor - hence, this was measured with an S560 preamplifier set to a gain of 100, and subsequently dividing the ASD by 100. To convert the Y-axis from V/rtHz to Hz/rtHz, I used two conversion factors: for the analyzer noise floor, PD dark noise, mixer noise and in-loop error signal, I made an Optickle simulation of a simple FP cavity (all parameters taken from the wiki optics page, except that I put in Yutaro's measured values for the arm loss and a modulation depth of 0.21 which I estimated as detailed here), and played around with the demodulation phase until I got an error signal that had the same qualitative shape as what I observed on an oscilloscope with the arms freely swinging (feedback to the laser PZT disabled). The number I finally used is 45.648 kHz/V (the main horns were 800mV peak-to-peak on an oscilloscope trace, results of the Optickle FP cavity simulation shown in Attachment #2 used to calibrate the X-axis). For the servo noise spectrum and in-loop control signal, I used the value of 2.43 MHz/V as determined here. 

I'm not sure what to make of the strong peaks in the mixer noise spectrum between ~60Hz and 10kHz - some of the more prominent peaks are 60Hz harmonics, but there are several peaks in between as well (these have been confusing me for some time now, they were present even when I made the measurement in this frequency range using the Agilent network analyzer. My plan is to repeat these measurements for the Xend now. 

Since there are a few hours to go before the locking efforts tonight, I've temporarily borrowed the channels used to read out the green beat frequency, and have hooked them up to the broadband IR PDs in the FOL box on the PSL table. I've used the network analyzer in the control room to roughly position the two beatnotes. I've also turned the green beat PDs back on (since the PSL shutter has to be open for the IR beat, and there is some green light falling on these PDs, but I've terminated the outputs).

So this needs to be switched back before locking efforts tonight...

With the IR beats going to the nominal ALS channels as Gautam left them, we're able to measure the free running frequency noise of the end AUX lasers. 

Specifically, the end shutters are closed, leaving the AUX lasers free running. The IR beats then consist of this free running light beating with the PSL light, and the ALS phase trackers give a calibrated frequency noise spectrum. I've stabilized the PSL light by locking the laser to the Y arm via MC2 acutation, so the free running AUX laser noise should dominate by a lot above the suspension resonances. This also has the benefit of giving me the use of the CAL'd Y arm displacement as a sanity check. 

At this point in time, it looks like the X laser is close to 10x noisier than the Y laser, though it does seem to be at the rule-of-thumb "10kHz/rtHz at 100Hz" level. 

Summary:

I redid this measurement and have now determined the actuator gain to be 4.61 +/- 0.10 MHz/V. This is now pretty consistent with the expected value of ~5MHz/V as reported here.

Details:

I made the following changes to the old methodology:

1. Instead of integrating around the excitation frequency, I am now just taking the ratio of peak heights (phase tracker output / error signal monitor) to determine the actuator gain.
2. I had wrongly assumed that the phase tracker output was calibrated to green Hz and not IR Hz, so I was dividing by two where this was not necessary. I think this explains why my previous measurement yielded an answer approximately half the expected value.

I also took spectra of the phase tracker output and error signal to make sure I was choosing my excitation frequencies in regions where there were no peaks already present (Attachment #1).

The scatter of measured actuator gains at various excitation frequencies is shown in Attachment #2.

Summary:

I've re-measured the noise breakdown for the Y-end AUX PDH system. Spectra are attached. I've also measured the OLTF of the PDH loop, from which the UGF appears to be ~8.5kHz. 

Discussion:

As Eric and Koji pointed out, the spectra uploaded here were clearly wrong as there were breaks in the spectra between decades of frequency. I redid the measurements, this time being extra careful about impedance mismatch effects. All measurements were made from the monitor points on the PDH box, which according to the schematic found here, have an output impedance of 49.9 ohms. So for all measurements made using the SR785 which has an input impedance of 1Mohm, or those which had an SR560 in the measurement chain (also high input impedance), I terminated the input with a 50ohm terminator so as to be able to directly match up spectra measured using the two different analyzers. I'm also using my more recent measurement of the actuator gain of the AUX laser to convert the control signal from V/rtHz to Hz/rtHz in the plotted spectra. 

As a further check, I locked the IR to the Y-arm by actuating on MC2, and took the spectrum of the Y-arm mirror motion using the C1CAL model. We expect this to match up well with the in-loop control signal at low frequencies. However, though the shapes seem consistent in Attachment #2 (light orange and brown curves), I seem to be off by a factor of 5- not sure why. In converting the Y-arm mirror motion spectrum from m/rtHz to Hz/rtHz, I multiplied the measured spectrum by , which I think is the correct conversion factor (FSR/(0.5*wavelength))?

Last week, Eric and I noticed that the green transmission levels at the PSL table seem much lower now than they did a month or two ago. To investigate this, I attempted to reproduce a power budget for the X endtable setup - see the attached figure (IR powers measured with calorimeter, green powers measured with Ophir power meter). A summary of my observations:

• The measurements were all made at an AUX-X laser diode current of 1.90A, and laser crystal temperature of 47.41 degrees. The current was chosen on the basis of the AUX-X frequency noise investigations. The temperature was chosen as this is the middle of three end-laser temperatures at wich a beat-note can be found now. Why should this temperature have changed by almost 5 degrees from the value reported here? I checked on the PSL laser controller that the PSL temperature is 33.43 degrees. Turning up the diode current to 2A does not change the situation significantly. Also, on the Innolight datasheet, the tuning geometry graphs' X-axes only runs to 45 degrees. Not sure of what to make of this. I tried looking at the trend of the offset to the slow temperature servo to see if there has been some sort of long-term drift, but was unable to do so...
• The IR power from the laser seems to have halved, compared to the value in Feb 2014. Is this normal deterioration over two years? Changing the laser diode current to 2A and the laser crystal temperature to ~42 degrees (the conditions under which the Feb 2014 measurements were taken) do not alter these numbers radically.
• The green power seems to have become 1/4 its value in Feb 2014, which seems to be consistent with the fact that the IR power has halved.

It is worth noting that two years ago, the IR power from the AUX-Y laser was ~280 mW, so we should still be getting "enough" green power for ALS?

I was trying to characterize the AM/PM response of the X end laser. I tried to measure the AM response first, as follows:

• I used the Thorlabs PDA 55, whose datasheet says it has 10MHz bandwidth - I chose it because it has a larger active area than the PDA 255, but has sufficient bandwidth for this measurement. 
• My earlier measurement suggested the IR power coming out of the laser is ~300mW. As per the datasheet of the PDA 55, I expect its output to be (1.5 x 10^4 V/A) * (~0.25 A/W) ~ 4000 V/W => I expect the PD output (driving the 50ohm input of the Agilent NA) to saturate at ~1.3mW. So I decided to use a (non-absorptive) ND 3.0 filter in front of the PD (i.e. incident power on the PD ~0.3 mW).
• I measured the AM response (inputA/inputR) by using the RF output from the Agilent analyzer (divided using a mini-circuits splitter half to input R and half to the laser PZT), and the PD output to input A. I set the power of the RF output on the analyzer to 0 dBm. 
• Attachment #1 shows the measured AM response. It differs qualitatively in shape from the earlier measurements reported in this elog and on the wiki below the 100kHz region. 
• I also took a measurement of the RIN with no drive to the laser PZT (terminated with a 50ohm terminator) - see Attachment #2. Qualitatively, this looks like the "free-running" RIN curve on the Innolight datasheet (see Attachment #3, the peak seems slightly shifted to the left though), even though the Noise Eater switch on the laser controller front panel is set to "ON". I neglected taking a spectrum with it OFF, I will update this elog once I do (actually I guess I have to take both spectra again as the laser diode and crystal temperatures have since been changed - this data was taken at T_diode = 28.5deg, I_diode = 1.90A, and T_crystal = 47.5 deg). But does this point to something being broken?
• I was unable to lock the PLL yesterday to measure the PM response, I will try again today.

It looks like some of the features may have shifted in frequency. The previous measurement results can be found in /users/OLD/mott/PZT/2NPRO, can you plot the two AM measurements together?

There were a number of directories in /users/OLD/mott/PZT/2NPRO, I've used the data in Innolight_AM_New. Also, I am unsure as to what their "calibration" factor is to convert the measured data into RIN, so I've just used a value of 0.8, with which I got the plot to match up as close as possible to the plot in this elog. I also redid the measurement today, given that the laser parameters have changed. The main difference was that I used an excitation amplitude of +15dBm, and an "IF Bandwidth" of 30Hz in the parameter files for making these measurements, which I chose to match the parameters Mott used. There does seem to be a shift in some of the features, but the <100kHz area seems similar to the old measurement now. 

Having put the PD back in, I also took measurements of the RIN with the input to the laser PZT terminated. There is no difference with the Noise Eater On or OFF! 

The PDA photodetectors are DC coupled, so you cannot use them to go directly into the analyzer. Must use the DC block so that you can reduce the input attenuation on the B channel and then lower the drive amplitude.

Good policy for TF measurements: drive as softly as you can and still measure in a reasonable amount of time, but no softer than that.

I attempted to measure the frequency noise of the extra Lightwave NPRO we have that is currently sitting on the PSL table. I did the following:

1. Turn the Lightwave NPRO back on.
2. Disable MC autolocker and close the PSL shutter.
3. Checked the alignment of the pick off from the PSL beam and the beam from the Lightwave NPRO onto the PDA10CF. These seemed okay, and I didn't really have to tweak any of the steering optics. I was getting a DC signal level of ~7V (the PD should drive a 1Mohm load up to 10V so it wasn't saturated).
4. Swept the crystal temperature on the Lightwave using the dial on the front panel of the controller. I found beatnotes at 48.1831 degrees and 45.3002 degrees. However, the amplitude of the beatnote was pretty small (approx. -40dBm on the Agilent NA). I tried playing around with the beam alignment and laser power on the Lightwave NPRO to see if I could increase the beatnote amplitude, but was unsuccessful - turning up the laser power (from the nominal level of 55mW as per the front panel display) caused the PD to saturate at 10V, while as far as I could tell, the alignment of the two beams onto the PD is reasonably good. This seems inconsistent with the numbers Koji has reported in this elog, where he was able to get a beatnote of ~1Vpp for a DC of 2.5 V. 
5. I tried locking the PLL (in roughly the same configuration as reported here) with this small amplitude beatnote but was unsuccessful. 

I've turned the Lightwave NPRO back to standby for now, in anticipation of further trials later today. I've also restored the IMC. 

After adjusting the alignment of the two beams onto the PD, I managed to recover a stronger beatnote of ~ -10dBm. I managed to take some measurements with the PLL locked, and will put up a more detailed post later in the evening. I turned the IMC autolocker off, turned the 11MHz Marconi output off, and closed the PSL shutter for the duration of my work, but have reverted these to their nominal state now. The are a few extra cables running from the PSL table to the area near the IOO rack where I was doing the measurements from, I've left these as is for now in case I need to take some more data later in the evening...

Summary of the work done today:

Alignment and other work on PSL table

As mentioned in a previous elog, the beatnote amplitude I obtained was tiny - so I checked the alignment of the two beams onto the PD. I did this as follows:

• Checked the alignment of the two beams on the recombination BS. Moved the steering mirror for the PSL beam until the two were aligned, as verified by eye using an IR card
• Turn the steering mirror just before the fast focusing lens and thorlabs PD (kept the fork fixed, just loosened the screw on the post to do this) such that the far-field alignment of the two beams could be checked. I used the BS to tweak this alignment as necessary
• Iterate the previous two steps till I was happy with the alignment
• Return steering mirror before the PD to its original position, tweak alignment until DC level on the PD was maximized (as verified using an oscilloscope) 
• Adjust the HWP just after the lightwave laser such that the power arriving at the PD from the PSL beam and the lightwave beam were approximately equal - verified by blocking each beam and checking change in the DC level

After doing all of this, I found a beatnote at ~-10dBm at a temperature of 45.3002 degrees on the Lightwave. The DC level was ~8V (~4V contribution from each beam). 

PLL and frequency nosie measurements:

Pretty much the same procedure as that described in this elog was followed for setting up the PLL and taking the measurements, except that this time, I used the two SR560s in a better way to measure the open loop TF of the PLL. This measurement suggested a UGF of ~ 10kHz, which seems reasonable to me. I turned the 11MHz marconi off because some extra peaks were showing up in the beat signal spectrum. I judged that the beatnote was not large enough to require the use of an attenuator between the PD and the mixer. I was able to lock the PLL easily enough, and I've attached spectra of the control signal (both uncalibrated and calibrated). To calibrate the spectrum, I did a quick check to determine the actuator gain of the spare Lightwave laser, by sweeping the fast PZT with a low frequency (0.5Hz) 1Vpp sine wave, and looking at the peak in the beat signal spectrum move on the network analyzer. This admittedly rough calibration suggests that the coefficient is ~5MHz/V, consistent with the other Lightwave. Eric suggested a more accurate way to do this would be to match up spectra taken using this method and by locking the PLL by actuating on the FM input of the Marconi - I didn't try this, but given the relatively large low-frequency drifts of the beatnote that I was seeing, and that the control signal was regularly hitting ~2V (i.e shifting the frequency by ~10MHz), I don't think this is viable with a low MHz/V coefficient on the Marconi, which we found is desirable as described here. 

Bottom line:

The spare Lightwave frequency noise seems comparable to the other two measurements (see attachment #2). If anything, it is a factor of a few worse, though this could be due to an error in the calibration? I'm also not sure why the shapes of the spectra from today's measurement differ qualitatively from those in elog 11929 above ~7kHz. 

Some random notes:

• Do we want to do an AM/PM characterization of the spare Lightwave laser as well? It might be easier to do the PM measurement while we have this measurement setup working
• Yesterday, I noticed some peaks in the spectrum of the PD output while only the PSL beam was incident on it, at ~35MHz and ~70 MHz. They were pretty small (~-50dBm), but still clearly discernible over the analyzer noise floor. It is unclear to me what the source of these peaks are.

Innolight 1W 1064nm, sn 1634 was purchased in 9-18-2006 at CIT. It came to the 40m around 2010

It's diodes should be replaced, based on it's age and performance.

RIN and noise eater bad. I will get a quote on this job.

The Innolight Manual frequency noise plot is the same as Lightwave' elog 11956