jiIn fact, it is one of the most difficult type mode profiling to measure a beam directly out from a laser source.

If you reduce the power by ADJ, this significantly changes the output mode as the pumping power varies temperature gradient of the laser crystal and thus thermal lensing in it. I'd recommend you to keep the nominal power.

If you use a PBS for power reduction, you should increase the transmission ~x10 from the minimum so that you are not dominated by possible junk polarization.

Any transmissive BK7 components where the beam is small can cause thermal lensing. In order to avoid this issue, I usually use two noncoated (or one AR coated) optical windows made of UV fused silica to pick off the beam. Once the beam power is reduced I suppose it is OK to use an additional ND filter in front of the CCD.

Another more reliable method is an old-good knife edge measurement.

As Koji pointed out in the previous elog, the CCD beam profiler was ill suited for this measurement. Nevertheless, to get a rough idea of the beam profile, I made a few rearrangements to my earlier setup:

• Kept the HWP at the same place it was, as this is roughly the configuration that is going to be used at the endtable anyways. It was ~7cm from the shutter housing on the laser head (unfortunately, I neglected to take a picture).
• Moved the PBS downstream till it was ~40 cm away (so as to minimize the thermal lensing effect from the ~300mW beam) from the laser head. Rotated the HWP till I got about 6mW of transmitted power (dumped the rest into a black hole)
• Installed a 95% reflecting BS to further attenuate the power to a level suitable for the CCD (dumped the reflected part onto a razor beam dump)
• Installed the CCD beam profiler and captured an image, at ~60cm from laser head. In this configuration, I was able to get a clean image capture without the CCD saturating. Unfortunately, I could not transfer it off the laptop used to operate the beam profiler, I will upload a screen capture tomorrow once I get it. Anyways, the main observation was that the beam appeared quite elliptical (ellipticity ~0.6). It was also not clear to what extent thermal lensing at the PBS/BS was afftecting this measurement.

Following Koji's suggestion, I decided to do a knife-edge measurement as well. The measurement configuration was similar to the one described above, except the PBS/BS were removed, and a 1.0 neutral density filter was was installed ~80cm from the laser head (here the ~300 mW beam was >2mm in diameter, as judged by eye). I used the Ophir power meter, which was why I had to install an ND filter as it is rated for 100mW max power. I will put a picture up tomorrow. Thermal lensing shouldn't be of much consequence here, as we just need the whole beam to fall onto the power meter active area (verified by eye), and only the relative change in power levels as the knife edge cuts the beam matters. I took the cross-sectional profile of the beam by translating the knife in the x-direction (i.e. cut the beam "left to right" ).

Attachments 1 and 2 are the results from todays measurements. It remains to repeat by cutting the beam along the y direction, and see what ellipticity (if any) shows up. I also found some "nominal" numbers in page 4 of the Lightwave datasheet - it tells us to expect a waist 5cm from the shutter housing, with horizontal and vertical 1/e^2 diameters of 0.5mm and 0.38mm respectively. My measurement suggests a horizontal diameter of ~0.25mm (half the "nominal" value?!), and the waist location to be 8.22cm from the shutter housing. I wonder if this discrepancy is a red flag? Could it be due to the HWP? I'm reasonably sure of my calculations, and the fits have come out pretty nicely as well...

I don't think the discrepancy is a serious issue as long as the mode is clean. The mode is determined by the NPRO crystal and is hard to change by anything except for the thermal lensing in the crystal.

And I never succeeded to reproduce the mode listed in the manual.

One thing you'd better to take care is that clipping of the beam produces diffraction. The diffracted beam spreads faster than the nominal TEM00 mode. Therefore the power meter should to be placed right after the razor blade. i.e. As you move the longitudinal position of the razor blade, you need to move the power meter.

I've repeated the measurement for the x-direction and also did the y-direction, taking into account Koji's suggestion of keeping the power meter as close as possible to the knife edge. Attachment #1 shows a picture of the setup used. Because an ND filter is required to use this particular power meter, the geometrical constraints mean that the closest the power meter can be to the knife edge is ~3cm. I think this is okay. 

The result from the re-measured X-scan (Attachments #2 and #4) is consistent with the result from yesterday. Unfortunately, in the y-direction (Attachments #3 and #4), I don't seem to have captured much of the 'curved' part of the profile, even though I've started from pretty much adjacent to the HWP. Nevertheless, the fits look reasonable, and I think I've captured sufficient number of datapoints to have confidence in these fits - although for the Y-scan, the error in the waist position is large. The ellipticity as measured using this method is also significantly smaller than what the CCD beam profiler was telling us. 

If we are happy with this measurement, I can go ahead and work on seeing if we can arrive at a minimally invasive mode-matching solution for the X-end table once we switch the lasers out...

[Steve, gautam]

Steve thinks that the X-end Innolight does not come with the noise-eater option (it is an add-on and not a standard feature, and the purchase order for the PSL Innolight explicitly mentions that it comes with the NE option, but the X-end Innolight has no such remarks), which would explain why there is no difference with the noise eater ON/OFF. During earlier investigations however, I had found that there was a cable labelled "Noise-Eater" connected to one of the Modulation Inputs on the rear of the Innolight controller. Today, we traced this down. The modulation input on the rear says "Current Laser Diode 0.1A/V". To this input, a Tee is connected, one end of which is terminated with a 50ohm terminator. The other end of the Tee is connected to a BNC cable labelled "Nosie-Eater", which we traced all the way to the PSL table, where it is just hanging (also labelled "X end green noise eater"), unterminated, at the southeast corner of the PSL table. It is unlikely that this is of any consequence given the indicated coefficient of 0.1A/V, but could this somehow be introducing some junk into the laser diode current which is then showing up as intensity fluctuations in the output? Unfortunately, during the PLL measurements, I did not think to disconnect this BNC and take a spectrum. It would also seem that the noise-eater feedback to the laser diode current is implemented internally, and not via this external modulation input jack (the PSL, which I believe has the noise-eater enabled, has nothing connected to this rear input)...

I've done a first pass at trying to arrive at a mode-matching solution for the X-end table once we swtich the lasers out. For this rough calculation, I used a la mode to match my seed beam (with z = 0 being defined as the shutter housing on the current position of the Innolight laser head, and the waist of the beam from the NPRO being taken as the square-root of the X and Y waists as calculated here), to a target beam which has a waist of 35um at the center of the doubling oven (a number I got from this elog). I also ignored the optical path length changes introduced by the 3 half-wave plates between the NPRO and the doubling oven, and also the Faraday isolator. The best a la mode was able to give me, with the only degrees of freedom being the position of the two lenses, was a waist of 41um at the doubling oven. I suppose this number will change once we take into account the effects of the HWPs and the Faraday. Moreover, the optimized solution involves the first lens after the NPRO, L1, being rather close to the second steering mirror, SM2 (see labels in Attachment #2, in cyan), but I believe this arrangement is possible without clipping the beam. Moreover, we have a little room to play with as far as the absolute physical position of the z=0 coordinate is - i.e. the Lightwave NPRO head can be moved ~2cm forward relative to where the Innolight laser head is presently, giving a slightly better match to the target waist (see attachment #3). I will check the lenses we have available at the 40m to see if a more optimal solution can be found, but I'm not sure how much we want to be changing optics considering all this is going to have to be re-done for the new end table... Mode-matching code in Attachment #4...

I looked in the optics cabinet to see what lenses we have available, and re-ran the mode-matching calculation to see if we could find a better solution - I'm attaching a plot for what looks like a good candidate (optimized mode-matching efficiency for the X mode is 100%, and for the Y mode, it is 97.98%), though it does involve switching "L1", which is currently a 175mm efl lens, for a 125mm efl lens. I've also indicated on the plot where the various other components are relative to the optimized positions of the lens, and it doesn't look like anything is stacked on top of each other. Also, the beam width throughout is well below 4.7mm, which is the maximum cited width the Faraday can handle, as per its datasheet. "L1" doesn't quite get the waist of the beam to coincide with the geometrical center of the Faraday, but I don't think this is requried? Also, I've optimized the mode matching using the measured X width of the beam (red curve in Attachment #1), and have overlaid the calculated Y width of the beam for the optimized position of the lenses (red curve in Attachment #1). The target waist was 35um at the center of the doubling oven, which the X profile achieves, but the Y profile has a width of 32 um at the same point.

In all the calculations, I've not accounted for possible effects of the HWPs and the Faraday on the beam profile....

[ericq, Gautam]

Tonight we embarked on the laser swap. In short, we have gotten ~210mW through the faraday doubler, but no green light is apparent. The laser outputs ~300mW, so it's not exactly a work of art, but I still expected some green. More work remains to be done...

Gautam took numerous photos of the table before anything was touched. One lens was swapped, as per Gautam's plan. The innolight laser and controller are on the work bench by the end table. The lightwave is on the table and on standby, and is not hooked up to the interlock mounted on the table frame, but instead one below the table directly next to the controller. The ETMX oplev laser is turned off. 

Steve pointed me to an old elog by Zach where he had measured the waist of the 1W Innolight NPRO. I ran a la mode with these parameters (and the original optics in their original positions prior to last night's activities), and the result is in reasonably good agreement (see Attachment #1) with my initial target waist of 35 um at the center of the doubling oven (which I presume coincides with the center of the doubling crystal). The small discrepancy could be due to errors in position measurement (which I did by eye with a tape measure) or because I did not consider the Faraday in the a la mode calculation. However, I wonder why this value of 35 um was chosen? In this elog, Kiwamu has determined the optimal waist size to be 50um at the center of the doubling crystal. Nevertheless, as per his calculations, the doubling efficiency should be non-zero (about 1% lower than the optimum conversion efficiency) at 35um or 70um, so we should be able to see some green light as long as we are in this fairly large range. So perhaps the fact that we aren't seeing any green light is down to sub-optimal alignment? I don't think there is a threshold power for SHG as such, its just that with lower input power we expect less green light - in any case, 200mW should be producing some green light... From what I could gather from a bunch of old elogs by Aidan, the Raicol PPKPT crystals have dimension 1mm x 1mm x 30mm (long axis along beam propagation), so there isn't a whole lot of room for error perpendicular to the direction of propagation... I wonder if it is possible, for the initial alignment, to have the top cover of the doubling oven open so that we can be sure we are hitting the crystal?

Some updates on the laser swap situation:

1. Mode-matching calculation: 

• I should have caught this earlier, but it was an oversight - the 35um waist that Andres used in his calculation is the waist size of the green beam. So I've been off by a factor of sqrt(2) all this while, and it works out that the desired waist size is indeed 50um, consistent with Kiwamu's elogs. Furthermore, as he has detailed in that elog, we actually want the free-space waist of the input beam to the doubling crystal to be ~6.7mm from the geometric center of the PPKPT crystal. 
• I redid the calculation using these updated numbers. Attachment #1 shows the results (optimized for the X-waist, Y-profile plotted for comparison and to see what mode-matching efficiency we get). The way I've set up the code is for a la mode to rank the solutions in order of increasing sensitivity to the positions of the lenses. It turns out the least sensitive solution doesn't actually achieve the desired waist size of 50um - moreover, it requires us to change both lenses currently in the path. The next lease sensitive solution, however, achieves the desired waist (i.e. 100% theoretical mode-matching efficiency for the X mode) and only requires us to swap the 125mm lens we put in yesterday for a 150mm lens (and the positions of the lenses change slightly compared to what we had yesterday as well). The sensitivity in a la mode is parametrized by the amount of power remaining in the TEM00 mode while displacing one or more components. It turns out that this figure of merit is only ~1% smaller for the 2nd least sensitive solution compared to the first. So I've chosen to use that solution. Code used to calculate the mode matching is Attachment #2.
• I've also plotted in Attachment #1 what the beam profile would have looked like before our modificatons last night, using the numbers from Zach's elog - as I have already mentioned in the previous elog, it suggests that the waist size would have been 39um, at a location 1.0821m in my coordinate system (desired position according to considerations in the previous 2 bullets is 1.0713). This seems to have been a sub-optimal configuration, but is also subject to errors I made in measuring the positions of the mirrors/lenses (I don't think I had 1cm resolution).

       2. Implementing the new solution:

• I've switched out the 125mm efl lens for a 150mm efl lens from the same Thorlabs lens kit. I've also moved both the lenses to their new appropriate positions.
• Unfortunately, I had put in some irides in the beampath before calculating this new (more appropriate solution). As a result, both the lenses are off from their optimal positions by a few mm because the irides get in the way. I guess we just have to live with this for now, and can adjust the positions of the lenses once we actually get some green light and are happy with all the other alignments...
• As noted in the previous elog, I suspect that we saw no green light yesterday because we were missing the doubling crystal altogether (given that we have only a 1mm x 1mm area to aim for - the Faraday serves as a coarse constraint, though its aperture has ~25times this area!). I tried playing around with the two steering mirrors immediately after the NPRO to see if I could get some green light out, but have not been successful yet. I may make some further trials later in the evening/tomorrow...

As I check the manual of the Innolight (pg17) and the datasheet of the Lightwave, I wonder if the Quarter Wave Plate that was placed immediately after the Innolight laser head is even necessary now - I assume the purpose of the combination of QWP+HWP was to turn the elliptically polarized light from the Innolight into linearly polarized light before the Faraday. But the Lightwave already produces linearly polarized light. I will check out what is the configuration on the Y-end table...

After the discussion at the meeting, I decided to go ahead and open the top of the oven so that I could get a visual on where the crystal was located - this helped in the alignment, and I was able to get some green light out of the oven. I had to tweak the position of the Doubling oven a little (with the top open) in order to align the crystal to the beam axis. However - I was only able to get ~140uW of green light going into the Faraday. I had measured the power at various points along the beam path recently with the old setup. We used to have ~860uW of green going into the Faraday there. To see if I could improve the situation a little, I checked that the beam was reasonably centered on both apertures of the IR Faraday, and then removed the irides upstream of the doubling oven. These were preventing me from placing the lenses exactly as per the a la mode solution. Once the irides were removed, I moved the lenses to their optimal positions as best as I could with a tape measure to mark out distances. I then further tweaked the position of the doubling oven using the 4 axis stage, monitoring the green power while doing so. The best I could get was ~200uW. Perhaps the positions of the lenses need to be optimized further. I also checked the IR power before and after the IR Faraday - these numbers are ~260mW and ~230mW respectively (I maximized the transmitted power through the Faraday by rotating the HWP, the QWP that was in the beam path has now been removed as the Lightwave outputs linearly polarized light), and compare favourably to the numbers in the old setup. Doing a naive scaling accounting for the fact that we have less power going into the doubling crystal, I would expect ~700uW of green light coming out, so it looks like the mode matching into the doubling crystal is indeed sub-optimal. However, now that things are roughly aligned, I hope the optimization will go faster...

It shipped out for repair evaluation.

Arrived to Hayward,CA   2016Feb16

After carefully tweaking the mode-matching of the IR into the crystal and the four-axis translation stage on which the doubling oven is mounted, I managed to recover 800uW of green power going into the green Faraday. Considering we have ~225mW of IR power coming out of the IR faraday (and roughly that amount going into the SHG crystal), I'd say this is pretty consistent (if not slightly better) with a recent power budget I had made for the X end. The amount of green power we get out of the doubling crystal is very sensitive to the alignment of the crystal to the beam axis. I suspect we could improve the situation slightly if the mode-matching lenses were mounted on translational stages so we could tweak their position, but the current situation on the X endtable does not provide space for this. In any case, I'd say we are at least as good as we were before, and so this should be an adequate fix until the new end-table is installed (though I don't know why we aren't seeing the predicted SHG conversion efficiency of 3-4% as predicted by Kiwamu's calculations, we are getting more like .36% conversion efficiency)...

Because the alignment of the beam before the doubling oven had changed, I had to adjust the steering mirrors to make the green beam go into the green faraday. I had placed a couple of irides for the green beam as a reference of the old path into the arm, and I used these to adjust some of the green mirrors to center the green beam on these. However, I did not observe any flashes in the arm. I will check if we are still mode-matched to the arm, and if the lenses downstream of the doubling oven need to be moved....

800e-6 / 0.225^2 = 0.016

=> 1.6%/W

I thought Kiwamu had roughtly 2%/W.

Eric and I spent some time yesterday night trying to recover the green in the arm after the laser swap. The problem essentially was that though I was getting ~800uW of green out of the doubling oven, the mode wasn't clean, and hence, the beam profile looked really messed up just before entering the arm cavity.We got to a point where we thought we were getting a good mode out of the doubling oven (as judged by propagating this beam onto the wall with the help of a mirror). But we were only getting ~400uW of green power. I tried tweaking the alignment of the oven on the 4 axis stage for a while, but was not able to improve the situation much. So I decided to start from scratch:

• First, I made sure that the IR beam from the laser was hitting the first steering mirror approximately at the center (see here for the optical layout). 
• Then I used the two steering mirrors immediately after the laser to make sure that the IR beam was hitting the first lens and the HWP before the IR faraday roughly at their center. 
• Next, I propagated the beam through the IR Faraday, again using SM1 and SM2 to do the steering - initial alignment through the Faraday was done by eye, and I did  some fine adjustment by maximizing the power coming out of the Faraday. We have 252mW of IR going into the IR Faraday, and 225mW coming out. I judged that these numbers were reasonable, and compared favourably to what we had with the Innolight.
• Keeping the downstream alignment, I used SM1 and SM2 to hit the second lens roughly at its center. I then re-measured the distance from this lens to the center of the doubling oven, and tweaked this slightly to match my mode-matching calculation. 
• I then tried to carefully play with this lens and the alignment of the doubling oven using the four axis stage. After (many) iterations, and with some luck, I managed to find what I judged to be a good alignment. Using the mirror-on-a-stick to reflect the green beam out of the doubler onto the wall nearby (see Attachment #1, all photos taken using my phone camera), the mode looks reasonably clean. I was also able to get 1mW of green power out of the doubler, an efficiency of ~2%/W. The doorknob should give some sense of scale, but at this point, the mode looks pretty clean (this was not the case previously).
• I then aligned the post doubler optics to send the beam through the green Faraday (~0.85mW of green out of the green Faraday) and through the two irides I had put in before swapping the lasers. As the beam propagates, however, some ellipticity in it becomes more and more apparent - especially after the f=-100mm lens between the two piezo mirrors. Attachment #2 shows the beam immediately after this lens, while Attachment #3 shows the beam on the iris just before it is sent into the arm cavity. 

I am beginning to wonder if this ellipticity is inherent from the IR beam from the laser? My beamscan results suggest that the beam is more divergent in the "P direction" as compared to the "S direction", which is borne out by these photographs. And if this is indeed the case, do we need to add cylindrical lenses to correct this?

Unrelated to this work: The ITMX Oplev seems to have wandered off so the X arm won't lock. I am not realigning the Oplev for now, but am turning the ITMX Oplev servo off for the night. 

Perhaps related to my work on the endtable: The ETMX oplev MEDM readings seemed to be frozen, though there was red light on the QPD on the endtable. Checking the CDS overview screen, I saw that all models on c1iscex had crashed. I sshed into c1iscex and restarted all the models, but the IOP block remained red. I checked the datetime, and found that this was wrong - so I followed the instructions here, but the "Diag Word" block remains red. I am shutting down the watchdog for ETMX and leaving this as is for now... This seems to have happened before...

I tried aligning the green beam, elliptical as it is, to the arm by using the various steering mirrors after the doubling oven. The following was done:

1. Eric and I aligned the beam through the green Faraday - we levelled the beam using an iris to check the beam height immediately after the Faraday and a little further along the beam propagation direction.
2. We checked that the beam is reasonably centered on all the lenses. We changed the lens holder for one of the lenses from a Thorlabs model to a Newport model, so as to get the lens to the correct height such that the green beam was roughly centered on it. 
3. I then tweaked the alignment of the steering mirrors until the reflected beam from the ETM roughly coincided with the input beam. The return beam is getting clipped slightly on the way back through the green Faraday, so some more alignment needs to be done. However, given the ITMX situation, I can't align the arm to IR, so I'm holding off on further alignment for now...

Given that we were seeing green flashes in the arms, I tried to see if I could get the green locked to the arm in a nice mode. For a start, I tried hooking up the PDH box and LO using the same settings as was being used previously. However, this did not work. I suppose we will have to do the whole AM/PM measurement for the Lightwave as well before we can determine what would be a suitable frequency for the LO. The AM measurement was relatively straightforward, I just repeated the same steps as detailed here. The two attachments show the AM response (one from 10kHz to 5MHz, the other for a narrower range of 100kHz to 1MHz, both with an excitation amplitude of 0dBm). To see if I could guess some sweetspot for operation, I tried setting the LO frequency to the two marked notch frequencies but was unsuccessful in getting the PDH lock going. At the moment, the alignment for the optics that picks off the IR after the doubler and routes it to the fiber are ccompletely misaligned, I will align these and do the PM measurement tomorrow and then we should conclusively be able to say what the appropriate frequency is to actuate on the PZT.

Unrelated to this work: the KEPCO high voltage power supply that drives the green steering mirror PZTs was switched off - I suppose this has been the case since the power outage last week. I turned it back on and reset it to the nominal settings: Vout = 100V, and Imax_out = 10mA, the driver board is currently drawing ~7mA which I judged to be consistent with the values labelled on the unit.

After the discussion at the meeting today, I decided to try and lock the green by sweeping through PZT dither frequencies in the vicinity of 200kHz without worrying about the AM/PM ratio for now. I was able to lock the PDH loop relatively quickly, at an empirically determined PZT dither frequency of 213.873kHz, 2Vpp (the amplitude was copied from the value at the Y-end). For today's efforts, I borrowed the sum+HPF pomona box from the Y-end, I will make a replica given that we are using Lightwave lasers at both ends now. After adjusting the PZT sliders and lenses on the translational stages at the endtable to maximize the green transmission as best as I could, I was able to get GTRX up to about 0.07 - this is far off from the value of ~0.25-0.3 I seem to remember us having with the old setup, even though we have more green light into the arm cavity. I will take a measurement of the loop transfer function to see what sort of bandwidth we have...

I spent some more time today trying to optimize the modulation frequency and amplitude for the X end PDH, and the alignment/mode-matching of the green to the arm. Some notes:

1. After my best efforts to tweak the alignment and mode-matching into the arm by using the two lenses on translational stages, I was able to get the green TRX up to about 0.06. As mentioned in a previous elog, this is much lower than what we had with the old setup, even though we have more green power going into the arm now. However, the mode looks pretty bright and clean on the monitors. Could the large ellipticity in the beam is the limiting factor now?
2. I measured the transfer function (attachment #1) of the PDH loop once I had settled on a modulation frequency and amplitude that I judged to be optimal (indicated on the plot). The UGF is ~7kHz. The PDH error signal as viewed on the oscilloscope is comparable to what we had with the Innolight. All this optimization was done empirically, I have yet to do the PM measurement. I can't seem to get more than 0.2 mW of IR arriving at the fiber coupler, the number I found in some older elogs is 2mW with the old setup.
3. I did some alignment of the PSL green and the X arm green onto the beat PD on the PSL table. After the power glitches, the doubling ovens do not automatically turn on, I had turned on the end ovens earlier, and today I turned on the PSL oven. I noticed some strange behaviour initially - though the setpoint was 36.9 deg C, when I enabled the heater, there was a large overshoot (it went to almost 50deg C). I disabled the heating at this point, and re-enabled it once the oven had cooled down to ~35 deg C. I didn't observe anything like this while turning on the end ovens. But the PID parameters at the PSL table are very different, so perhaps this large overshoot and ringing is to be expected. In any case, I managed to get this working. But I was not able to find a beatnote tonight. 

To do:

1. Verify that the two beams are aligned on the beat PD - I think I've done this carefully by checking the near and far-field, but I will double check.
2. Find the beat note and look at the ALS noise performance with this new setup to see if it is usable even though GTRX is only 20% of what it used to be..
3. Fix the coupling of the IR pickoff into the fiber at the endtable. Once this is done, I can do the PM measurement, and finding a beatnote may be easier given the IR beat PDs have a much wider bandwidth...

I continued the hunt for a green beatnote today - I decided to take the output from the RF amplifiers sitting on the PSL table and directly connect it to the analyzer in the control room while I swept the temperature of the end laser 10,000 counts on either side of a temperature at which I had taken this measurement - so I expect the beatnote should be found somewhere in this neighbourhood. But I did not see any peaks throughout the sweep. I re-checked that the mode overlap onto the BBPD is reasonable. We have considerably less transmitted green power from the arm now than we did before the laser swap (by a factor of ~3) but I still expected to see some sort of beat signal.

It would be handy to have the IR beat set up as well for this process, but as mentioned in a previous elog, I was getting only ~0.1 mW of IR power incident on the coupler at the end table last week. As I had suspected, tweaking the alignment of the steering optics for the pick-off IR beam after the doubler improved the situation somewhat, and I am now getting about 1mW of IR power incident on the coupler at the end table. But I've not been able to adjust the alignment into the fiber at the end such that I get any IR light at the PSL table.  

[Koji, Johannes, gautam]

With Koji's and Johannes' help, I managed to resolve the coupling the pick-off IR beam into the fiber at the X end. I will put up a more detailed elog about how this was done - but in summary, we have about 31% coupling efficiency into the fiber, which isn't stellar, but I felt this was adequate to find a beatnote. Koji also pointed out that the collimation telescope attached to the fiber at the X-end is poorly mounted - this is something to fix when we swap endtables, but this was not addressed right now because if we were to adjust this, we would also have to adjust the mode matching into the fiber.

I then attempted to tune the temperature to find the IR beatnote. While doing so, I noticed some strange features of the controller - there are essentially two display modes relevant to laser crystal temperature, one which allows us to change the setpoint and one which is an actual readback of the temperature (this one can't be adjusted). While tuning the temperature, I noticed that the latter display ("LT") did not change in value. On a hunch, I disconnected the "SLOW" control BNC on the front panel, and voila, I was able to tune the setpoint and observe the measured temperature shift accordingly. I was thus able to find a reasonably strong IR beatnote (-9dBm) at T ~ 44.6 deg C (the beat PD was set to 0dB attenuation, i.e. high gain mode). However, the moment I reconnected the SLOW control BNC, the beatnote vanished (it gradually shifted out of range of the HP network analyzer), and the same thing happens if I terminate the SLOW control BNC connector! I don't understand this behaviour, as the manual says that the range of voltages accepted to this input is +/-10V, so I would assume 0V means do nothing, but clearly this isn't the case, as the beatnote is being shifted in frequency by > 1GHz, and the tuning coefficient is listed as 5GHz/V in the manual. This situation needs further investigation.

Since I had a reasonable IR beatnote setup, I returned the HP analyzer to the control room and tried to see if a green beatnote was present as well - I first ran ASS, then maximized the green transmission using the PZT mirrors, but no beatnote is evident. The contrast isn't great, the ratio of AUX power to PSL power on the green beat PD is something like 5:1, so this probably requires some tuning as well. I will update this elog after today evening's activities...

[ericq, gautam]

Summary of work done tonight:

• The PDH setup at the Y-end has been restored after I had pulled the whole thing apart some weeks ago to see that nothing was obviously wrong with the uPDH box
• Adjusted the temperature of the Y-end laser such that a beatnote was obtained - I did this using the IR beat (the end laser temp wasn't updated after the PSL temp was changed recently)
• The Y green beatnote was found easily, there was no alignment on the PSL table necessary, though there is room to improve this situation (beatnote amplitude was ~ -35dBm though we are used to more like -25dBm)
• The X green beat remains elusive - I played around with the alignment onto the green beat PD at the PSL table for some time, and the two beams are aligned as far as I can tell given the constrained area available in that area. It may be that I have to clear some optics, do a rigorous near-field/far-field alignment of the two beams and then try again
• Since we had two strong (-5dBm for Y, -9dBm for X) IR beatnotes, we decided to take the ALS noise spectra for these. So as to not overload the amplifiers, a -10dB attenuator (-6dB) was placed directlty after the Y (X) IR beat PDs, before routing these signals through the usual green beat signal chain. Attached is the measured spectrum. The new values of the temperature sliders at which beatnotes can be found are : 1700 for X and -5990 for Y (spectra taken at these values).

To do:

• For both ends, find the three temperatures at which we have beatnotes, and choose the middle one
• PM characterization of AUX X laser - it may be that the excess noise in the X spectrum is due to sub-optimal PDH
• Align the Y green better at the endtable, also take an OLTF measurement for the Y PDH loop
• Re-check the alignment onto the green beat PD for the X beat

Remarks:

• The Lightwave laser controllers differ from the Innolight ones in that it is not possible to directly set the signal to the SLOW control BNC to 0, and have that as the new reference point. Rather, there seems to be some setpoint which is saved as a reference, and the moment any signal is applied to the SLOW control BNC, it adjusts the actual temperature w.r.t. this saved setpoint. I believe it is possible to update this setpoint (it is also possible to update the calibration of the power readout, this is an additional issue at the X end), but since this wasn't critical, I've left it as is for the moment...
• The ALS nosie spectrum for the Y arm IR beat is surprisingly good!

The good news: both green beatnotes have now been found. The problem was alignment on the green beat PD on the PSL table which I fixed. They are about -40dBm in amplitude (compare to -25dBm we used to see). But looking at the phase tracker Q output seems to suggest that there is adequate signal...

The bad news: the ALS noise still looks bad (see attachment)- I think the IR beat for the Y was perhaps marginally better. The beat amplitude for the X beat was optimized on the PSL table with the help of the oscilloscope. There may be some headroom for improvement with the Y beat.

I also did the AM/PM measurement for the replaced lightwave, chose an LO frequency based on this, and took the loop OLTF, plots to follow...

To do: 

• Check Y-end PDH loop OLTF
• Optimize beat note amplitude of Y beat
• Align Y-green better to the arm using steering mirrors on the endtable.
• Double check calibration of PM/AM measurement and that I've picked the correct LO frequency/ I don't have any other ideas for improving the situation with the X beat though

I've been a little behind on my elogs so here is an update of the end laser situation.

IR beat for X-end recovered

• The issue was optimizing the alignment into the fiber at the end table.
• Using Fluke fiber illuminator helped in aligning IR pickoff into mount. Useful note: there is an unused fiber running between the X-end and the PSL table, by connecting these at the PSL table, I was able to monitor the coupled power while remaining at the X-end.
• Another major issue was that one of the steering mirrors (marked "Y1" in Attachment #1) was mounted with AR coated side facing the beam. This was fixed by simply rotating the post, the mirror was not removed from its mount. I can only assume that this mirror is in this kind of mount because of space constraints.
• The fiber has a collimating telescope attached to the end of it. In principle, this gives us more angular acceptance while coupling the beam into the fiber, but as I found out, the acceptance is still tiny (I don't have a number to quantify it). Furthermore, the Fluke visual fault locator revealed that the lens in the collimating telescope is not set up great - when re-doing the X end table, we should fix this situation so as to have a fairly large collimated beam coming out of the fiber when illuminated from the other end, this would make the mode matching much easier.
• Bottom line: we have ~1.2 mW of IR light incident on the coupler at the end table, and ~400uW of IR power at the PSL table => coupling efficiency is ~30%, not stellar, but sufficient for now I guess. After the various splitters etc, there is about 160uW of EX IR light and ~300uW of PSL IR light incident on the beat PD, and the beat amplitude is about -9dBm.

AM/PM characterization of newly installed Lightwave

• Having recovered the IR beat, I set out to do the PM characterization for the end laser.
• Attachment #2 shows the electrical setup. The IR beat was piped to the X-end via an existing long cable that runs between the vertex and the endtable. Not shown in the diagram, but I used a 20dB coupler to keep track of the beat frequency on the HP spectrum analyzer while doing this measurement.
• I restricted myself to the range between 100kHz and 500kHz to do the scan, because it takes quite a while to do the scan with fine resolution (IF bandwidth = 10Hz).
• To calibrate the magnitude response to rad/V, I divided the output of the network analyzer (converting dB to absolute magnitude first) by the amplitude of the signal seen on the monitoring oscilloscope while the PLL is unlocked. This number was 96mV/rad.
• To confirm that the error signal spectrum is indeed a good approximation of the "plant" transfer function (i.e that 100kHz >> UGF of loop transfer function of the PLL), I measured the loop TF of the PLL - Attachment #3 suggests a UGF of ~ 16kHz, which means the assumption is reasonable.
• Excitation amplitude was -25dBm (which gave reasonable SNR), and 3 averages were taken.
• The AM measurement was done using the same procedure as detailed here - the DC block was used. The DC level of the PD output was 2.72 V. The excitation amplitude was 0dBm.
• Attachment #4 shows the AM response, PM response and PM/AM ratio
• The peak in the PM/AM ratio at 256620 Hz is compelling because it is not too sharp (and so we can be reasonably confident we are at a good operating point) and the PM response of 23.83 rad/V is also acceptable. 
• As a consistency check, the PM response of ~30rad/V at 100kHz => PZT actuator gain is ~3MHz/V, which is in the region we expect it to be...

Next steps in recovering ALS and trying to lock again

• Having set the PDH modulation frequency to 256.62kHz, I took the spectrum of ALS noise using the IR beat (i.e. by piping the IR beat signal through the electronics the green beats usually go through - 6dB and 10dB attenuators were placed immediately after the beat PDs for the X and Y arms respectively, to make the signal levels compatible with the electronics), Attachment #5 unfortunately suggests that the noise performance is still poor, and I suspect the situation will be similar using the green beat (though I have not measured this yet).
• The modulation depth could be sub-optimal for the X-end PDH, I have to measure this and check that it is at an acceptable level. This will also tell me if I need to change the sum+HPF pomona box used to send the PDH control signal + piezo dither signal to the laser PZT. In order to do this, I need to know what the input impedance to the FAST control BNC is - the manual isn't very helpful, it just says the piezo has a capacitance less than 10,000pF. I suppose I will have to actually measure this.
• PDH loop OLTFs have to be re-measured for both ends to check that the servo gain's are appropriately placed.
• We know that the mode-matching into the arm for the X end is poor (I have yet to quantify this) - I suspect that the beam ellipticity is the main culprit. However, the DC transmitted power levels at the PSL table are comparable to (even slightly better than) the Y arm numbers, and so this cannot be the sole reason why the X-arm ALS noise is so much worse... I will continue my investigations next week...

Attachment #1

Since I could not determine how many volts at the LO input of the pomona box input corresponds to how many volts at the laser PZT, I measured the transfer function between these points using the Agilent network analyzer. The measured TF suggests that for a function generator output of 2Vpp, we get approximately 75mrad of phase modulation, which compares reasonably well with the value of 120mrad reported here. I did not attempt to further increase the LO output signal to push this number closer to 120mrad, as with 2Vpp from the function generator we get +7dBm at the mixer, which is what it wants - so I wanted to avoid any attenuators etc...

Attachments #2 and #3

After ensuring that we have appreciable phase modulation, I set out to measure the PDH OLTFs and adjust the gain on the uPDH boxes accordingly. The X end gain is at 6.0, and the Y end gain is at 4.0. Before measuring the Y-end OLTF, I adjusted the steering mirrors to increase GTRY to ~0.45. GTRX remains a paltry 0.05... But the UGFs seem satisfactory..

Attachment #4

Finally, I took the ALS noise spectrum for the green beats. The beat note amplitudes on the network analyzer in the control room are still puny compared to what we had, -40dBm for Y and -45dBm for X. But the phase tracker Q values are ~1000 and ~3000 for X and Y respectively, which are pretty close to what these were if memory serves me right. There may still be some room for optimization of the PDH loop gains etc, and we could perhaps look at lowering the gain of the REFL PD at the X end? I also have yet to do the sweep for the 3 temperatures at which we can find a beatnote and park at the middle one...

These spectra suggest we could even possibly try locking? We are approximately a factor of 3 above the reference for X and on par with the reference for Y....

Unrelated to this work: I also realinged the PMC, PMC transmission is now 0.730V up from ~0.65V.

Why is the transmission of X green so low? Perhaps you can phase lock the IR and then scan the X frequency, using the X arm as the analyzer. i.e. put a slow ramp into MC2 to pull the PSL frquency and thus the green frequency. You can record a movie of the scan using the framegrabber and record the green transmission peaks to see how big the mode match is exactly (which modes are so big)

Oct. 15, 2016

Another attempt (following elog 8755) to extract the oven transfer function from time series data using Matlab’s system identification functionalities.

The same time series data from elog 8755 was used in Matlab’s system identification toolbox to try to find a transfer function model of the system.

From elog 8755: H(s) is known from current PID gains: H(s) = 250 + 60/s +25s, and from the approximation G(s)=K/(1+Ts), we can expect the transfer function of the system to have 3 poles and 2 zeros.

I tried fitting a continuous-time and a discrete time transfer function with 3 poles and 2 zeros, as well as using the "quick start" option. Trying to fit a discrete time transfer function model with 3 poles and 2 zeros gave the least inaccurate results, but it’s still really far off (13.4% fit to the data).

Ideas:

1. Obtain more time domain data with some modulation of the input signal (also gives a way to characterize nonlinearities like passive cooling). This can be done with some minor modifications to the existing code on the raspberry pi. This should hopefully lead to a better system ID.

2. Try iterative tuning approach (sample gains above and below current gains?) so that a tune can be obtained without having to characterize the exact behavior of the heater.

Oct. 16, 2016

-Found the raspberry pi but it didn’t have an SD card

-Modified code to run directly on a computer connected to the TC 200. Communication seems to be happening, but a UnicodeDecodeError is thrown saying that the received data can’t be decoded.

-Some troubleshooting: tried utf-8 and utf-16 but neither worked. The raw data coming in is just strings of K’s, [‘s, and ?’s

-Will investigate possible reasons (update to Mac OS or a difference in Python version?), but it might be easier to just find an SD card for the raspberry pi which is known to work. In the meantime, modify code to obtain more time series data with variable input signals.

I connected to the serial port using screen (through Terminal) and using Arduino's serial monitor and basically received the same strings that were received through python, so it's not a python issue. Checked the other TC 200 module and was also receiving nonsense, but it was all question marks instead of mostly K's and ['s.

This rules out a few possible reasons for the weird data. Next steps are to set up and configure the Raspberry Pi (which has been interfaced before) and see if the problem continues.

I've been trying to understand the green beat setup on the PSL table to see if I can explain the abysmal mode-matching of the arm and PSL green beams on the broadband beat PDs. My investigations suggest that the mode-matching is very sensitive to the position of one of the lenses in the arm green path. I will upload a sktech of the PSL beat setup along with some photos, but here is the quick summary.

1. I first mapped the various optical components and distances between them on the PSL table, both for the arm green path and the PSL green path
2. Next, setting the PSL green waist at the center of the doubling oven and the arm green waist at the ITMs (in vacuum distances for the arm green backed out of CAD drawing), I used a la mode to trace the Gaussian beam profile for our present configuration. The main aim here was to see what sort of mode matching we can achieve theoretically, assuming perfect alignment onto the BBPDs. The simulation is simplified, the various beam splitters and other transmissive optics are treated as having 0 width
3. It is pretty difficult to accurately measure path lengths to mm accuracy, so to validate my measurement, I measured the beam widths of the arm and PSL green beams at a few locations, and compared them to what my simulation told me to expect. The measurements were taken with a beam profiler I borrowed from Andrew Wade, and both the arm and PSL green beams have smooth Gaussian intensity profiles for the TEM00 mode (as they should!). I will upload some plots shortly. The agreement is pretty good, to within 10%, although geometric constraints on the PSL table limited the number of measurements I could take (I didn't want to disturb any optics at this point)
4. I then played around with the position of a fast (100mm EFL) lens in the arm green path, to which the mode matching efficiency on the BBPD is most sensitive, and found that in a +/- 1cm range, the mode matching efficiency changes dramatically

Results:

Attachments #1 and 2: Simulated and measured beam profiles for the PSL and arm green beams. The origin is chosen such that both beams have travelled to the same coordinate when they arrive at the BBPD. The agreement between simulation and measurement is pretty good, suggesting that I have modelled the system reasonably well. The solid black line indicates the (approximate) location of the BBPD

Attachment #3: Mode matching efficiency as a function of shift of the above-mentioned fast lens. Currently, after my best efforts to align the arm and PSL green beams in the near and far fields before sending them to the BBPD results in a mode matching efficiency of ~30% - the corresponding coordinate in the simulation is not 0 because my length measurements are evidently not precise to the mm level. But clearly the mode matching efficiency is strongly sensitive to the position of this lens. Nevertheless, I believe that the conclusion that shifting the position of this lens by just 2.5mm from its optimal position degrades the theoretical maximum mode matching efficiency from >95% to 50% remains valid. I propose that we align the beams onto the BBPD in the near and far fields, and then shift this lens which is conveniently mounted on a translational stage, by a few mm to maximize the beat amplitude from the BBPDs. 

Unrelated to this work: I also wish to shift the position of the PSL green shutter. Currently, it is located before the doubling oven. But the IR pickoff for the IR beat setup currently is located after the doubling oven, so when the PSL green shutter is closed, we don't have an IR beat. I wish to relocate the shutter to a position such that it being open or closed does not affect the IR beat setup. Eventually, we want to implement some kind of PID control to make the end laser frequencies track the PSL frequency continuously using the frequency counter setup, for which we need this change...

I tried to realize an improvement in the mode matching onto the BBPDs by moving the lens mentioned in the previous elog in this thread. My best efforts today yielded X and Y beats at amplitudes -15.9dBm (@37MHz) and -25.9dBm (@25MHz) respectively. The procedure I followed was roughly:

1. Do the near-field far-field alignment of the arm and PSL green beams
2. Steer beam onto BBPD, center as best as possible using the usual technique of walking the beam across the photodiode
3. Hook up the output of the scope to the Agilent network analyzer. Tweak the arm and PSL green alignments to maximize the beat amplitude. Then move the lens to maximize the beat amplitude.

As per my earlier power budget, these numbers translate to a mode matching efficiency of ~53% for the X arm beat and ~58% for the Y arm beat, which is a far cry from the numbers promised by the a la mode simulation (~90% at the optimal point, I could not achieve this for either arm scanning the lens through a maximum of the beat amplitude). Looks like this is the best we can do without putting in any extra lenses. Still a marginal improvement from the previous state though...

  Calculation for the input mode cleaner

I have been working on the calculation for the input mode cleaner. I have come out with a new optical setup that will allow us increase the Gouy phase different between the WFS to 90 degrees. I use a la mode to calculate it. The a la mode solution :

   label            z (m)      type             parameters         
    -----            -----      ----             ----------         
    MC1                    0    flat mirror      none:            
    MC3               0.1753    flat mirror      none:            
    MC2              13.4587    curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700       
    Lens1            29.6300    lens             focalLength: 1.7183
    BS2              29.9475    flat mirror      none:            
    First Mirror     30.0237    flat mirror      none:            
    WFS1             30.2269    flat mirror      none:            
    Second Mirror    30.2650    flat mirror      none:            
    Third Mirror     30.5698    flat mirror      none:            
    Lens2            30.9885    lens             focalLength: 1     
    Fourth Mirror    31.0778    flat mirror      none:            
    Lens3            31.4604    lens             focalLength: 0.1000
    Fifth Mirror     31.5350    flat mirror      none:            
    Sixth Mirror     31.9414    flat mirror      none:            
    WFS2             31.9922    flat mirror      none:      

I attached a pictures how the new setup is supposed to look like. 

Can you please give us some more details on how this design was decided upon? What were the design considerations?

It would be nice to have a shorter path length for WFS2. What is the desired spot size on the WFS? How sensitive are they going to be to IMC input alignment? Are we still going to be recentering the WFS all the time?

Nic, Andres, and I discussed some more about the MC WFS project today. We want to shorten the proposed WFS2 path. Andres is going to explore moving the 2" diameter lens in coming up with layouts. We also want the WFS to face west so that we can see the diode face with an IR viewer easily and dump the reflected beams in the razor dumps.

We wondered about fixing the power levels and optical gain:

1. What is the MC modulations depth? What would happen if we increase it a little? Does anyone know how to set it? Will this help the MC frequency noise?
2. What is the max power on the WFS? I guess it should be set so that the power dissipation of the detector is less than 1 W with the MC unlocked. So P_diss = (100 V)*(I_tot), means that we should have less than 10 mA or ~50 mW when the MC is unlocked.
3. Another consideration is saturation. The RF signals are tiny, but maybe the DC will saturate if we use any more power. The quadrants are saturated when unlocked and ~200 mV locked. According to D990249, the DC gain in the head is 1000 V/A. The measured power levels going into the heads (w/ MC unlocked) are: P_WFS1 = 4.9 mW and P_WFS2 = 7.7 mW. We don't have control of the DC gain, but there is a 10x and 100x switch available inside the demod board (D980233). From these numbers, I figure that we're in the 100x position and so the effective DC gain between photocurrent and the DC readback voltages is 100 kOhm. Therefore, we are in no danger of optical or electronics saturation. And the unlocked photocurrent of ~40/100000=0.4 mA => 0.04 W heat generated in the diode, so we're OK to increase the power level by another factor of 2-4 if we want.
4.  We noticed that the ADC inputs are moving by ~50 counts out of 65000, so we're doing a really bad job of signal conditioning. This was previously noticed 6 years ago but we failed to follow up on it. Feh.

While checking this out, I converted the McWFS DC offsets script from csh to bash and committed it to the SVN. We need to remove the prefix 'feature' that Jamie has introduced to cdsutils so that we can use C1 again.

 I did the calculation, and I reduced the beam Path. In my calculation, I restricted the waist size at the WFSs to be between 1mm-2mm also the other parameter is that the Gouy Phase different between the WFSs have to be 90 degrees. I also try to minimize the amount of mirrors used. I found the Gouy phase to be 89.0622 degrees between the WFSs and the following table shows the solution that I got from a la mode:

  label                         z (m)                   type               parameters         
    -----                         -----                    ----                  ----------         
    MC1                    0                        flat mirror           none:            
    MC3                    0.1753               flat mirror           none:            
    MC2                   13.4587              curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700 (m)       
    Lens1                 28.8172              lens                   focalLength: 1.7183(m)
    BS2                    29.9475              flat mirror           none:            
    First Mirror         30.0237              flat mirror           none:            
    Lens3                 30.1253              lens                  focalLength: -0.100 (m)
    Lens2                 30.1635              lens                 focalLength: 0.1250(m)
    WFS1                 30.2269              flat mirror         none:            
    Second Mirror    30.2650              flat mirror         none:            
    Third Mirror       30.5698              flat mirror         none:            
    Lens4                30.8113              lens                  focalLength: -0.075 (m)
    WFS2                31.0778              flat mirror         none:            

In the first image attached below is the a la mode solution that show the waist size in the first WFS, and I used that solution to calculate the solution of the waist size for the second WFS, which is shown in figure 2. I photoshop a picture to illustrate how the new setup it supposed to look like. 

IMC Calculation and Setup

I have been working in the calculation for improving the Gouy Phase separation between the WFSs. I tried different possible setup, but the three big constrains in choosing a good optical table setup are to have a Waist size that range from 1mm-2mm, the Gouy Phase  between the WFSs have to be greater than 75 degrees and there has to be a steering mirror before each WFS. I will be showing the best calculation because that calculation complies with Rana request of having both WFSs facing west and having the shortest beam path. I approximate the distances by measuring with a tape the distance where the current optics are located and by looking at the picture that I took I approximated the distance where the lenses will be placed. I'm using a la mode for calculating the gouy phase different. I attached a picture of the current optical table setup that we have. Using a la mode, I found that the current gouy phase that we have is 49.6750 degrees.

Now, for the new setup, a run a la mode and found a Gouy phase of 89.3728 degrees. I have to create a two independent beam path: one for the WFS1 and another one for WFS2. The reason for this is that a la mode place everything in one dimension so and since the WFS1 will have a divergence lens in order to increase the waist size, and since that lens should not be interacting with the waist size in the WFS2. We need two beam path for each WFS.  A la mode give us the following solution:

For the beam path of the WFS1

    label                z (m)           type             parameters        
    -----                  -----              ----             ----------        
    MC1                   0              flat mirror          none:           
    MC3                   0.1753     flat mirror          none:           
    MC2                   13.4587   curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700 (m)     
    Lens1                 29.3705   lens                  focalLength: 1.0201 (m)
    BS2                    29.9475   flat mirror          none:           
    First Mirror         30.0237   flat mirror          none:           
    Lens3                30.2000    lens                  focalLength: -0.100 (m)
    WFS1                30.4809    flat mirror         none: 

For the beam path of the WFS2

    label                   z (m)             type             parameters        
    -----                    -----                 ----             ----------        
    MC1                    0               flat mirror          none:           
    MC3                    0.1753      flat mirror          none:           
    MC2                    13.4587    curved mirror    ROC: 17.8700 (m)     
    Lens1                  29.3705    lens                   focalLength: 1.0201 (m)
    BS2                     29.9475    flat mirror          none:           
    Second Mirror    30.2650     flat mirror          none:           
    Lens2                 30.4809     lens                  focalLength: -0.075 (m)
    Third Mirror        30.5698     flat mirror          none:           
    WFS2                30.6968      flat mirror          none:  

I attached bellow how the new setup should look like in the second picture and also I include and attachment of the a la mode code.

 I used Mist to be able to see the read out that we get in the WFSs that take the Mode Cleaner Reflection and the QPD that take the transmitted from MC2. In the following, plots I'm misaligned the each mirrors: MC1, MC2 and MC3. The misalignment are in Yaw and Pitch. I'm dividing the WFSs reading by the total power reflect power, and I'm dividing the QPD for the MC2 transmission by the total transmitted power. In my Mist model, I have a laser of 1W and my EOM is modulated at 30MHz instead of 29.5MHz and the modulation depth was calculating by measuring the applied voltage using and Spectrum analyzer. I using Kiwamu measurement of modulation depth efficiency vs the applied voltage, https://dcc.ligo.org/DocDB/0010/G1000297/001/G1000297-v1.pdf,  I got a modulation depth of 0.6 mrad. I put this modulation depth and I got the following plots: The fourth and fifth attachment are for the current optical setup that we have. The sixth and seventh attachment is for the new optical setup. The eighth attachment is showing the mode cleaner cavity resonating. The last attachment contains the plots of WFS1 vs WFS2, MC2_QPD vs WFS1, MC2_QPD vs WFS3 for each mirror misaligned. The last two attachment are the MIST code for the calculation.

We have all the lenses that we need. I checked it last Friday and if everything is good we will be ready to do the new upgrade this coming Friday. For increasing the power, I check and we have different BS so we can just switch from the current setup the BS. Can you let me know if this setup look good or if I need to chance the setup? I would really love to do this upgrade before I leave.

 Upgrade of IMC Reflection Optical Setup

Nick and I upgrade the IMC. We move both WFSs and placed them facing west. When aligning the beam into the WFS, we make sure that the beam were hitting the center of the mirrors and then we placed the lenses in their corresponding position. We used the beam scanner to measure the waist and the waist in the second WFS was bigger than 1mm, and the second WFS was a little bit below than 1mm. We center the beam in the WFSs and in the PD. We did haven't measure whether we have a good Gouy Phase. Below I attached the picture of how the new setup look like.   

 The Napa earth quake magnitude 6 did not have any effect on the suspensions.

 The Goy phase upgrade was done nicely. The IOO pointing did not change. Credit owned to Nick and Andres.

  IFO is locked right on.

 I decided to see what I could do with the new WFS setup. 

First, I adjusted the WFS digital demod angles. Once I ensured that the static MC alignment and DC alignment onto the WFS was good, I drove MC2 in pitch with the WFS output off. I then did the usual thing of making the Q peak at the excitation frequency go away. Here are the changes:

• WFS1 Q1: 7 -> -24 (-31)
• WFS1 Q2: 6.5 -> -9.5 (-16)
• WFS1 Q3: -6.5 -> -26.5 (-20)
• WFS1 Q4: 47 -> 30 (-17)

• WFS2 Q1: -51 -> -39 (-12)
• WFS2 Q2: -39 -> -21 (-18)
• WFS2 Q3: -32 -> -20 (-12)
• WFS2 Q4: -120 -> -108 (-12)

I then drove each MC mirror in pitch and yaw respectively, and measured the TF from excitation to the WFS signal (dB Magnitude, sign):

I looked through some old ELOG's of Suresh's and used similar logic to scripts/MC/WFS/wfsmatrix2.m to generate a new output matrix. (This involves creating a null sensing vector that is orthogonal to the measured ones, and inverting that matrix) 

Old:

New:

I had to flip a gain or two to keep things stable, then measured the WFS error signal spectra to see if this made anything better. The WFS1 spectra look better, but WFS2 not so much. 

The loops would need a more thorough investigation, but for now, they're at least a little calmer. The MC is stabler than immediately after the upgrade, but there's still room for improvement. 

I'm sure that the 1~3Hz motion comes from the mirror motion, but not 100% sure what is causing
the broad stochastic noise. If this is the beam jitter, this penetrates to the IFO via the WFS servos.
Is there any way to characterize this noise in order to compare it with the actual (estimated) motion of the mirrors?

The last MC_F calibration was done by Ayaka : Elog 7823

I saw that entry, but it doesn't state what the calibration is in units of Hz/counts. It just gives the final calibrated spectrum.

As a starting point, I was looking at some of the old elogs and tried turning on the MCL feedback path with the existing control filters today. I tried various combinations of MCL Feedback and FF on and off, and looked at the MCL error signal (which I believe comes from the analog MC servo board?) spectrum for each case. We had used this earlier this year when EricQ and I were debugging the EX laser frequency noise to stabilize the low frequency excursions of the PSL frequency. The low frequency suppression can be seen in Attachment #1, there looks to be some excess MCL noise around 16Hz when the servo is turned on. But the MC transmission (and hence the arm transmission) decays and gets noisier when the MCL feedback path is turned on (see Attached StripTool screenshots).

I wanted to get a clearer idea of the FSS servo and the various boxes in the signal chain and so Lydia and I poked around the IOO rack and the PSL table - I will post a diagram here tomorrow.

We then wanted to characterize the existing loop. It occurred to me later in the evening to measure the plant itself to verify the model shape used to construct the invP filter in the feedback path. I made the measurement with a unity gain control path, and I think there may be an extra zero @10Hz in the model.

Earlier in the evening, we measured the OLG of the MCL loop using the usual IN1/IN2 prescription, in which above 10Hz, the measurement and FOTON disagree, which is not surprising given Attachment #1.

I didn't play around with the loop shape too much tonight, but we did perform some trials using the existing loop, taking into account some things I realized since my previous attempts. The summary of the performanceof the existing loop is:

• Below 1Hz, MCL loop injects noise to the arm control signal. I need to think about why this is, but perhaps it is IMC sensing noise?
• Between 1-4Hz, the MCL loop suppresses the arm control signal
• Between 4-10Hz (and also between 60-100Hz for the Xarm), the MCL loop injects noise. Earlier in the evening, we had noticed that there was a bump in the X arm control signal between 60-100Hz (which was absent in the Y arm control signal). Koji later helped me diagnose this as too low loop gain, this has since been rectified, but the HF noise of the X arm remains somewhat higher than the Y arm.

All of the above is summarized in the below plots - this behaviour is (not surprisingly) in line with what Den observed back when he put these in.

The eventual goal here is to figure out if we can get an adaptive feedback loop working in this path, which can take into account prevailing environmental conditions and optimally shape the servo to make the arms follow the laser frequency more closely at low frequencies (i.e. minimize the effect of the noise injected by IMC length fluctuations at low frequency). But first we need to make a robust 'static' feedback path that doesn't inject control noise at higher frequencies, I need to think a little more about this and work out the loop algebra to figure out how to best do this...

In the Generic Pentek interface board, which is used to take in the analog 2-pin LEMO cable from the MC Servo board, there is some analog whitening before the signal is sent into the ADC.

There are jumpers in there to set whether it is 0, 1, or 2 stages of 150:15 (z:p) whitening.

We want to measure the IMC round-trip loss using the Isogai et. al. ringdown technique. I spent some time looking at the various bits and pieces needed to make this measurement today, this elog is meant to be a summary of my thoughts.

1. Inventory
   • AOM (in its new mount to have the right polarization) has been installed upstream of the PMC by Johannes. He did a brief check to see that the beam is indeed diffracted, but a more thorough evaluation has to be done. There is currently no input to the AOM, the function generator on the PSL table is OFF.
   • The Isogai paper recommends 3 high BW PDs for the ringdown measurement. Souring through some old elogs, I gather that the QPDs aren't good for this kind of measurement, but the PDA255 (50MHz BW) is a suitable candidate. I found two in the lab today - one I used to diagnose the EX laser intensity noise and so I know it works, need to check the other one. We also have a working PDA10CF detector (150 MHz BW). In principle, we could get away with just two, as the ringdown in reflection and transmission do not have to be measured simultaneously, but it would be nice to have 3
   • DAQ - I think the way to go is to use a fast scope triggered on the signal sent to the AOM to cut the light to the IMC, need to figure out how to script this though judging by some 2007 elogs by rana, this shouldn't be too hard...
2. Layout plans
   • Where to put the various PDs? Keeping with the terminology of the Isogai paper, the "Trans diode" can go on the MC2 table - from past measurements, there is already a pickoff from the beam going to the MC TRANS QPD which is currently being dumped, so this should be straightforward...
     
   • For the "Incident Diode", we can use the beam that was used for the 3f cancellation trials - I checked that the beam still runs along the edge of the PSL table, we can put a fast PD in there...
   • For the "REFL diode" - I guess the MC REFL PD is high BW enough, but perhaps it is better to stick another PD in on the AS table, we can use one of the existing WFS paths? That way we avoid the complicated transfer function of the IMC REFL PD which is tuned to have a resonance at 29.4MHz, and keeps interfacing with the DAQ also easy, we can just use BNC cables...
   • We should be able to measure and calibrate the powers incident on these PDs relatively easily.
      
3. Other concerns
   • I have yet to do a thorough characterization of the AOM performance, there have been a number of elogs noting possible problems with the setup. For one, the RF driver datasheet recommends 28V supply voltage but we are currently giving it 24V. In the (not too distant) past, the AOM has been seen to not be very efficient at cutting the power, the datasheet suggests we should be able to diffract away 80% of the central beam but only 10-15% was realized, though this may have been due to sub-optimal alignment or that the AOM was receiving the wrong polarization...
4. Plan of action
   • Check RF driver, AOM performance, I have in mind following the methodology detailed here
   • Measure PMC ringdown - this elog says we want it to be faster than 1us
   • Put in the three high BW PDs required for the IMC ringdown, check that these PDs are working
   • Do the IMC ringdown

Does this sound like a sensible plan? Or do I need to do any further checks?

I've pulled out the 24V fuse block which supplies power to the AOM RF driver. The way things are set up on the PSL table, this same voltage source powers the RF amplifiers which amplify the green beatnote signals before sending them to the LSC rack. So I turned off the green beat PDs before pulling out the fuse. I then disconnected the input to the RF driver (it was plugged into a DS345 function generator on the PSL table) and terminated it with a 50 ohm terminator. I want to figure out a smart way of triggering the AOM drive and recording a ringdown on the scope, after which I will re-connect the RF driver to the DS345. The RF driver, as well as the green beat amplifiers and green beat PDs, remain unpowered for now...

Over the weekend, I worked a bit on getting these ringdowns going. I will post a more detailed elog tomorrow but here is a quick summary of the changes I made hardware-wise in case anyone sees something unfamiliar in the lab...

• PDA10CF PD installed on PSL table in the beam path that was previously used for the 3f cancellation trials
• PDA255 installed on MC2 trans table, long BNC cable running from there to vertex via overhead cable tray
• PDA255 installed on AS table in front of one of the (currently unused) WFS

I spent a while in preparation for these trials (details tomorrow) like optimizing AOM alignment/diffracted power ratio, checking AOM and PMC switching times etc, but once the hardware is laid out, it is easy to do a bunch of ringdowns in quick succession with an ethernet scope. Tonight I did about 12 ringdowns - but stupidly, for the first 10, I was only saving 1 channel from the oscilloscope instead of the 3 we want to apply the MIT method.

Here is a representative plot of the ringdown - at the moment, I don't have an explanation for the funky oscillations in the reflected PD signal, need to think on this.. More details + analysis to follow...

Dec 5 2016, 130pm:

Actually the plot I meant to put up is this one, which has the time window acquired slightly longer. The feature I am referring to is the 100kHz oscillation in the REFL signal. Any ideas as to what could be causing this?

As promised, here is the more detailed elog.

Part 1: AOM alignment and diffraction efficiency optimization

I started out by plugging in the input to the AOM driver back to the DS345 on the PSL table, after which I re-inserted the 24V fuse that was removed. I first wanted to optimize the AOM alignment and see how well we could cut the input power by driving the AOM. In order to investigate this, I closed the PMC, unlocked the PSL shutter, and dialed the PSL power down to ~100mW using the waveplate in front of the laser. Power before touching anything just before the AOM was 1.36W as measured with the Coherent power meter. 

The photodiode (PDA255) for this experiment was placed downstream of the 1%(?) transmissive optic that steers the beam into the PMC (this PD would also be used in Part 2, but has since been removed)...

Then I tuned the AOM alignment till I maximized the DC power on this newly installed PD. It would have been nicer to have the AOM installed on the mount such that the alignment screws were more easily accessible, but I opted against doing any major re-organization for the time being. Even after optimizing the AOM alignment, the diffraction efficiency was only ~15%, for 1V to the AOM driver input. So I decided to play with the AOM driver a bit.

Note that the AOM driver is powered by 24V DC, even though the spec sheet says it wants 28V. Also, the "ALC" input is left unconnected, which should be fine for our purposes. I opted to not mess with this for the time being - rather, I decided to tweak the RF adjust potentiometer on the front of the unit, which the spec sheet says can adjust the RF power between 1W and 2W. By iteratively tuning this pot and the AOM alignment, I was able to achieve a diffraction efficiency of ~87% (spec sheet tells us to expect 80%), in a switching time of ~130ns (spec sheet tells us to expect 200ns, but this is presumably a function of the beam size in the AOM). These numbers seemed reasonable to me, so I decided to push on. Note that I did not do a thorough check of the linearity of the AOM driver after touching the RF adjust potentiometer as Koji did - this would be relevant if we want to use the AOM as an ISS servo actuator, but for the ringdown, all that matters is the diffraction efficiency and switching time, which seemed satisfactory. 

At this point, I turned the PSL power back up (measured 1.36W just before the AOM). Before this, I estimated the PD would have ~10mW power incident on it, and I wanted it to be more like 1mW, so I I put an ND 1.0 filter on to avoid saturation.

Part 2: PMC "ringdown"

As mentioned in my earlier elog, we want the PMC to cut the light to the IMC in less than 1us. While I was at it, I decided to see if I could do a ringdown measurement for the PMC. For this, I placed two more PDs in addition to the one mentioned in Part 1. One monitored the transmitted intensity (PDA10CF, installed in the old 3f cancellation trial beam path, ~1mW incident on it when PMC is locked and well aligned). I also split off half the light to the PMC REFL CCD (2mW, so after splitting, PMC CCD gets 1mW through some ND filters, and my newly installed PD (PDA255) receives ~1mW). Unfortunately, the PMC ringdown attempts were not successful - the PMC remains locked even if we cut the incident light by 85%. I guess this isn't entirely surprising, given that we aren't completely extinguishing the input light - this document deals with this issue.... But the PMC transmitted intensity does fall in <200ns (see plot in earlier elog), which is what is critical for the IMC ringdown anyways. So I moved on.

Part 3: IMC ringdown

The PDA10CF installed in part 2 was left where it was. The reflected and transmitted light monitors were PDA255. The former was installed in front of the WFS2 QPD on the AS table (needed an ND1.0 filter to avoid damage if the IMC unlocks not as part of the ringdown, in which case ~6mW of power would be incident on this PD), while the latter was installed on the MC2 transmission table. We may have to remove the former, but I don't see any reason to remove the latter PD. I also ran a long cable from the MC2 trans table to the vertex area, which is where I am monitoring the various signals.

The triggering arrangement is shown below.

To actually do the ringdown, here is the set of steps I followed.

1. Make sure settings on scope (X & Y scales, triggering) are optimized for data capture. All channels are set to 50ohm input impedance. The trigger comes from the "TTL" output of the DS345, whose "signal" output drives the AOM driver. Set the trigger to external, the mode should be "normal" and not "auto" (this keeps the data on the screen until the next trigger, allowing us to download the data via ethernet.
2. The DS345 is set to output a low frequency (0.005Hz) square wave, with 1Vpp amplitude, 0.5V offset (so the AOM driver input is driven between 0V and 1V DC, which is what we want). This gives us ~100 seconds to re-lock the IMC, and download the data, all while chilling in the control room
3. The autolocker was excellent yesterday, re-acquiring the IMC lock in ~30secs almost every time. But in the few instances it didn't work, turn the autolocker off (but make sure the MC2 tickle is on, it helps) and manually lock the IMC by twiddling the gain slider (basically manually do what the autolock script does). As mentioned above, you have ~100 secs to do this, if not just wait for 200secs and the next trigger...
4. In the meantime, download the data (script details to follow). I've made a little wrapper script (/users/gautam/2016_12_IMCloss/grabChans.sh) which uses Tobin's original python script, which unfortunately only grabs data one channel at a time. The shell script just calls the function thrice, and needs two command line arguments, namely the base name for the files to which the data will be written, and an IP address for the scope...

It is possible to do ~15 ringdowns in an hour, provided the seismic activity is low and the IMC is in a good mood. Unfortunately, I messed up my data acquisiton yesterday, so I only have data from 2 ringdowns, which I will work on fitting and extracting a loss number from. The ringing in the REFL signal is also a mystery to me. I will try using another PDA255 and see if this persists. But anyways, I think we can exclude the later part of the REFL signal, and fit the early exponential decay, in the worst case. The ringdown signal plots have been uploaded to my previous elog. Also, the triggering arrangement can be optimized further, for example by using the binary output from one of our FEs to trigger the actual waveform instead of leaving it in this low frequency oscillation, but given our recent experience with the Binary Output cards, I thought this is unnecessary for the time being...

Data analysis to follow.

I have left all the PDs I put in for this measurement. If anyone needs to remove the one in front of WFS2, go ahead, but I think we can leave the one on the MC2 trans table there...

The MC1 suspension troubles vanished as they came - but the IMC was remaining locked stably so I decided to do another round of ringdowns, and investigate this feature in the reflected light a bit more closely. Over 9 ringdowns, as seen in the below figure, the feature doesn't quite remain the same, but qualitatively the behaviour is similar.

Steve helped me find another PDA255 and so I will try switching out this detector and do another set of ringdowns later tonight. It just occurred to me that I should check the spectrum of the PD output out to high frequencies, but I doubt I will see anything interesting as the waveform looks clean (without oscillations) just before the trigger...