Jenne and I measured the situation using a SHP-150 directly attached to the REFL165 RF output, and at first glance, the magnitude of the 165MHz signal seems to not be distorted by the amplifier. 

We will soon investigate whether 165 signal quality has indeed improved. 

ARG, I accidentally permuted the digital demod angles. This significantly weakens the argument for believing AS55I is broken... In fact, Jenne and I did some investigations this afternoon that showed that the channel is indeed working. SRX error signal strangeness remains unexplained, however. 

Also, I have yet to compensate for the gain of the violin filters; the actuator calibration numbers I used were for the SUS-LSC FMs, not the LSC FMs where I was injecting. New measurements will be taken soon, as well, since REFL165 is hopefully improved. 

Corrected plots are below. 

The notch filter has been installed directly attached to the output of the SHP-150 at the PD output. Structurally, there is a right angle SMA elbow between the two filters; I set up a post holder under the notch pomona box to prevent torque on the PD. Via directional coupler and AG4395, we measured the output of the REFL165 RF amplifier with the PRMI locked on REFL33. 

Note, the plot below is not referred to the amplifier output, as in my previous plots; it is directly representative of the amplifier output spectrum. 

There are no RF signals being output above -28dBm, thus I am confident that we are not subject to compression distortion. 

Given the last measurements we made (ELOG 10692), I estimate that the notch has reduced the power at 110MHz by ~33dB, which is 9dB higher than the notch performance Koji measured when he made it. Maybe this could be due to the non-50Ohm impedance of the HPF distorting the tuning, or I physically detuned it when mounting it on the PD. Still, 33dB is pretty good, and may even give us room to amplify further. (ZRL-700+ instead of the ZFL-1000LN+?)

I did some simulations to see if we are susceptible to HOM resonances as we reduce the CARM offset. I restricted my search to HG modes of the Carrier+[-55,-11,0,+11,+55]MHz fields with n+m<6, and used all the real physical parameters I could get ahold of. 

In short, as I change the CARM offset, I don't see any stray resonances within 2nm of zero, either in PRFPMI or DRFPMI. 

Now, the mode matching in my simulation is not the real mode matching our real interferometer has. Thus, it can't tell us how much power we may see in a given mode, but it can tell us about our susceptibility to different modes. I.e. if we were to have some power in a certain mode coming out of the IMC, or present in the vertex, we can see what it would do in the arms. 

Since my simulation has some random amounts of power in each HOM coming into the interferometer, I simply swept the CARM offset and looked for peaks in the power of each mode. Many of the fields exhibited gentle slopes over the range, and we know we ok from 3nm->~100pm, so I made the selection rule that a "peak" must be at least 10 times as big as the minimum value over the whole range, in order to see fields that really do have CARM dependence. 

In the following plots, normalized IFO power is plotted and the locations of HOM peaks are indicated with circles; their actual heights are arbitrary, since I don't know our real mode content. However, I'm not really too concerned, since all I see is some -11MHz modes between 2-3nm of full resonance, where we have no problem controlling things... Also, all of the carrier HOMs effectively co-resonate with the 00 mode, which isn't too surprising, and I didn't include these modes in the plots.

Finally, I visually inspected the traces for all of the modes, and didn't really find anything else peeking out. 

Code, plots attached.  

So, with my last entry, I was guilty of just throwing stuff into the simulation and not thinking about physics... so I retreated to Siegman for some algebraic calculations of the additional Guoy phase accumulated by the HOMs in the arms -> their resonant frequencies -> the arm length offset where they should resonate. Really, this isn't completely precise, as I treated the arms independently, with slightly differing ETM radii of curvature, but I would expect the "CARM Arm" to behave as a sort of average of the two arm cavities in this regard. (EDIT: Also, I didn't really consider the effect of the coupled vertex cavities... so there's more to be done)

The basic idea I used was:

• Assume ITMs are effectively flat, infinite Rc
• Use 40mwiki values for ETM curvatures
• Each additional HG order adds arccos(sqrt(1 - Larm/Rc)) of Guoy phase for a one way trip down the cavity (Eqn 19.19 in Sigman)
• For each HOM order up to 5 of the carrier and first order sidebands, add the appropriate phase shift 
• fold it onto +-FSR/2 of the carrier 00 resonance, convert to m

In practice, I threw together a python script to do this all and print out a table. I've highlighted the values within 10nm, but the closet one is 3.8nm

Results:

I've extended my analysis to the PRFPMI case, with the current working knowledge of radii of curvature and cavity lengths. However, losses were not included.

I do not see any HOM activity within about 20nm of the carrier TM00 resonance. 

Basically, what I did was use the standard formulae for the reflection and transmission coefficients of FB cavities viewed as compound mirrors. However, I modified the normal spatial propagation terms to include the additional Guoy phase accumulated by the HOMs. I created these coefficients for each arm individually, and then used (rX + rY)/2 as a mirror in the PRC, and used that to create the transmission coefficient for the PRFPMI as a whole, as a function of frequency offset from the carrier, spatial mode order and CARM offset. As a check, this produced the correct finesse for the carrier lock to the single arm and PRFPMI. 

Here is a PRFPMI CARM FSR of all of the fields' power transmission coefficients, up to order n+m=5. 

One can observe some split peaks. There are two causes, the biggest effect is the mismatch between ETM radii of curvatures (ETMX:59.48, ETMY:60.26):, followed by asymmetric arm length(X:37.79, Y:37.81). (I judged this by the visual change of the plot when changing different factors). 

In the following plot, I broke down the peaks by mode order:

Code, plots attached!

I took a quick look at single arm RIN. Actuating on MC2 vs. the ETM, or using AS55 instead of POY11 made no noticeable difference in the arm cavity RIN.  Not too surprising, but there it is.

 Similar to what Jenne did the other night, I kept the PRFPMI arm DoFs locked on ALS, in hopes to check out the RF error signals. 

I was able to stably sit at nominally zero offset in both CARM and DARM, tens of minutes at a time, and the PRMI could reacquire without a fuss. Arm powers would rest between 10 and 20, intermittently exhibiting the "buzzing" behavior that Jenne mentioned when passing through resonance. 100pm CARM offset means arm powers of around 10, so since our ALS RMS is on this order, this seems ok. I saw TRX get as high as 212 counts, which is just about the same that I've simulated as the maximum power in our IFO. 

To get this stable, I turned off all boosts on MICH and PRCL except PRCL FM6, and added matrix elements of 0.25 for TRX and TRY in the trigger line for the PRMI DoFs. The logic for this is that if the arm powers are higher than 1, power recycling is happening, so we want to keep things above the trigger down value of 0.5, even if POP22 momentarily drops. 

I also played around a bit with DARM offsets. We know from experience that the ALS IR resonance finding is not super precise, and thus zero in the CARM FM is not zero CARM offset when on ALS. The same obviously holds for DARM, so I moved the DARM offset around, and could see the relative strengths of flashes change between the arms as expected.

I've written down some GPS times that I'm going to go back and look at, to try to back out some information about our error signals. 

Lastly, there may be something undesirable happening with the TRX QPD; during some buzzing, the signal would fluctuate into negative values and did not resemble the TRY signal as it nominally would. Perhaps the whitening filters are acting up...

 Steve had me measure the RIN of a JDSU HeNe laser. I used a PDA520, and measured the RIN after the laser had been running for about an hour, which let the laser "settle" (I saw the low frequency RIN fall after this period).

Here's the plot and zipped data.

Steve: brand new laser with JDSU 1201 PS

 At Rana's request, I've made an in-situ measurement of the RIN of all of our OpLevs. PSL shutter closed, 10mHz BW. The OpLevs are not neccesarily centered, but the counts on darkest quadrant on each QPD is not more than a factor of a few lower than the brightest quadrant; i.e. I'm confident that the beam is not falling off. 

I have not attached that raw data, as it is ~90MB. Instead, the DTT template can be found in /users/Templates/OL/ALL-SUM_141125.xml

Here are the mean and std of the channels as reported by z avg 30 -s, (in parenthesis, I've added the std/mean to estimate the RMS RIN)

Dividing each spectrum from DTT by these mean values gives me this plot:

ETMY is the worst offender here...

 I've uploaded a note at T1400735 about a new implementation of CESAR ESCOBAR ideas I've been working on. Please send me any and all feedback, comments, criticisms!

Using the things I talk about in there, I was able to have a time domain simulation of a 40m arm cavity transition through three error signals, without hardcoding the gains, offsets, or thresholds for using the signals. Some results look like this:

I'm going to be trying this out on the real IFO soon...

[J,Q]

After some housekeeping (ASS is wonky, alignment of X green beat was bad, tuning of demod angles, fm gains for REFL165), we were able to bring the PRFPMI up to arm powers of 8 very stably. 

We were keeping an eye on the DARM OLG, to make sure the gain was correct. We then saw a bump around 120Hz. Here is the bump. 

Changing CARM offset changes its amplitude. Maybe it's a DARM optical spring. It didn't occur to me until after we lost lock that we could have tweaked the DARM offset to move it around if this was the case. 

Unfortunately, due to some unexplained locklosses, we weren't able to get back into a state to measure this more... which is annoying. During that stable lock, Jenne stated that PRCL and DARM noises were looking particularly good. 

We may want to tweak the way we handle the transmission PD handoff; maybe we want to force the switch at a certain place in the carm_up script, so that we're not flipping back and forth during an IR handoff; I think this may have been responsible for a lock loss or two. 

 With some advice from Jamie, I've gotten the lock loss plotting script that is used at LHO working on our machines. The other night, I modified the ALSwatch.py script to log lockloss times. Tying it together, I've written a small wrapper script that grabs the last time from the lockloss log, and plots it. 

It is: scripts/LSC/LocklossData/lastlock.sh

Jamie's going to make an adjustment to the pydv codebase that will let me implement the auto y-scaling that we like. We also will need to get a feel for the right timing window, once we see what kind of delay in the ALSwatch script is typical. 

Here's an example of the output, with the window of [-10,+2] seconds from the logged GPS time:

The other day, I hooked up the agilent analyzer to OUT2 of the MC board, which is currently set to output the MC refl error signal.  I've written a GPIB-based program that continuously polls the analyzer, and plots the live spectrum, an exponentially weighted running mean, and the first measured spectrum. 

The intended use case is to see if the FSS or MC loops are going crazy when we're locking. Sometimes the GPIB interface hangs/loses its connection, and the script needs a restart.

The script lives in scripts/MC/MCerrmon

This exact situation was happening at ETMX. I did the exact same change to the database, now I can read and write all four gain segments.

Yesterday, we were seeing anomalously high low frequency RIN in the y-arm (rms of 4% or so). I swung by the lab briefly to check this out. Turns out, despite TRY of 1.0, there was reasonable misalignment. ASS with the excitation lowered by a factor of two, and overall gain at 0.5 or so aligned things to TRY=1.2, and the RIN is back down to ~0.5% I reset the Thorlabs FM to make the power = 1.0

I then went to center the transmitted beam on the transmon QPD. Looking at the quadrant counts as I moved the beam around, things looked odd, and I poked around a little... 

I strongly suspect that we have significantly mismatched gains for the different quadrants on the ETMY QPD. 

Reasoning: With the y-arm POY locked, I used a lens to focus down the TRY beam, to illuminate the quadrants individually. Quadrants 2 and 3 would go up to 3 counts, while 1 and 4 would go up to 0.3 and 0.6, respectively. (These counts are in some arbitrary units that were set by setting the sum to 1.0 when pitch and yaw claimed to be centered, but mismatched gains makes that meaningless.)

I haven't looked more deeply into where the mismatch is occurring. The four individual whitening gain sliders did affect the signals, so the sliders don't seem sticky, however I didn't check the actual change in gains. Will the latest round of whitening board modifications help this?

Hopefully, once this is resolved, the DC transmission signals will be much more reliable when locking...

 Nodus (solaris) is dead, long live Nodus (ubuntu).

Diego and I are smoothing out the Kinks as they appear, but the ELOG is running smoothly on our new machine. 

SVN is working, but your checkouts may complain because they expect https, and we haven't turned SSL on yet...

This is entirely my fault. 

Last week, while doing some stuff with PRY, I put this filter in SUS_PRM_LSC, to stop some saturations from high frequency sensing noise

After the discussion at today's meeting, it struck me that I might have left it on. Turns out I did. 

20 degree phase lag at 200Hz can explain the instability, some non-flat shape at few hundreds of Hz explains the non 1/f shape.

Sorry about all that...

 I have completed all of the model modifications and medm screen updates to allow for feedback from the transmon QPD pitch and yaw signals to the ITMs. Now, we can design and test actual loops...

The signals come from c1sc[x/y] to c1rfm via RFM, and then go to c1ass via dolphin. 

Out of curiosity about the RFM+dolphin delay, I took a TF of an excitation at the end SUS model (C1:SUS-ETM[X/Y]_QPD_[PIT/YAW]_EXC) to the input FM in the ASC model (C1:ASC-ETM[X/Y]_QPD_[PIT/YAW]_IN1). All four signals exhibit the same delay of 122usec. I saved the dtt file in Templates/ASC/transmonQPDdelay.xml

This is less than a degree under 20Hz, so we don't have to worry about it. 

 [ericq, Diego]

Some locking efforts tonight; many locklosses due to PRC angular motion. Furthest progress was arm powers of 15, and I've stared at the corresponding lockloss plot, with little insight into what went wrong. (BTW, lastlock.sh seems to catch the lock loss reliably in the window)

CARM and DARM loops were measured not long before this lock loss, and had nominal UGFs (~120Hz, ~20deg PM). However, there was a reasonably clear 01 mode shape at the AS camera, which I did nothing to correct. Here's a spectrum from *just* before the lockloss, recovered via nds. Nothing stands out to me, other than a possible loss of DARM optical gain. (I believe the references are the error signal spectra taken in ALS arms held away + PRMI on 3F configuration)

The shape in the DARM OLTF that we had previously observed and hypothesized as possible DARM optical spring was not ever observed tonight. I didn't induce a DARM offset to try and look for it either, though.

Looking into some of the times when I was measuring OLTFs, the AS55 signals do show coherence with the live DARM error signal at the excitation frequencies, but little to no coherence under 30Hz, which probably means we weren't close enough to swap DARM error signals yet. This arm power regime is where the AS55 sign flip has been modeled to be...

A fair amount of time was spent in pre-locking prep, including:

• The usual X green beat alignment tweak, to make the X ALS control not terrible
• Both ITM oplevs were centered
• For some reason, I had to flip the signs of the REFL165 matrix elements for the PRMI...
• "Restore PRMI SB" has ASC automatically enabled, which results in unexpected kicks even with LSC off, which caused a few minutes head-scratching

Since the Nodus switch, the offsite backup scripts (scripts/backup/rsync.backup) had not been running successfully. I tracked it down to the weird NFS file ownership issues we've been seeing since making Chiara the fileserver. Since the backup script uses rsync's "archive" mode, which preserves ownership, permissions, modification dates, etc, not seeing the proper ownership made everything wacky. 

Despite 99% of the searches you do about this problem saying you just need to match your user's uid and gid on the NFS client and server, it turns out NFSv4 doesn't use this mechanism at all, opting instead for some ID mapping service (idmapd), which I have no inclination of figuring out at this time. 

Thus, I've configured /etc/fstab on Nodus (and the control room machines) to use NFSv3 when mounting /cvs/cds. Now, all the file ownerships show up correctly, and the offsite backup of /cvs/cds is churning along happily. 

 I just stumbled upon this while poking around:

Since the great crash of June 2014, the scripts backup script has not been workingon op340m. For some reason, it's only grabbing the PRFPMI folder, and nothing else. 

Megatron seems to be able to run it. I've moved the job to megatron's crontab for now.

I've set up nodus to start the ELOG on boot, through /etc/init/elog.conf. Also, thanks to this, we don't need to use the start-elog.csh script any more. We can now just do:

controls@nodus:~  $ sudo initctl restart elog

I also tweaked some of the ELOG settings, so that image thumbnails are produced at higher resolution and quality. 

Given that op340m showed some undesired behavior, and that the FSS slow seems prone to railing lately, I've moved the FSS slow servo job over to megatron in the same way I did for the MC autolocker. 

Namely, there is an upstart configuration (megatron:/etc/init/FSSslow.conf), that invokes the slow servo. Log file is in the same old place (/cvs/cds/caltech/logs/scripts), and the servo can be (re)started by running: 

controls@megatron|~ > sudo initctl start FSSslow

Maybe this won't really change the behavior. We'll see

I ssh'd in, and was able to run each script manually successfully. I ran the initctl commands, and they started up fine too. 

We've seen this kind of behavior before, generally after reboots; see ELOGS 10247 and 10572. 

In order to fix ELOG search, I have started running ELOG v2.9.2 on Nodus.

Sadly, due to changes in the software, we can no longer use one global write password. Instead, we must now operate with registered users.

Based on recent elog users, I'll be creating user accounts with the following names, using the same old ELOG write password. (These will be valid across all logbooks)

• ericq
• rana
• koji
• diego
• jenne
• manasa
• Steve
• Kate
• Zach
• Evan
• Aidan
• Chris
• Dmass
• nicolas
• Gabriele
• xiaoyue

All of these users will be "Admins" as well, meaning they can add new users and change settings, using the "Config" link.

Let me know if I neglected to add someone, and sorry for the inconvenience.

RXA: What Eric means to say, is that "upgrading" from Solaris to Linux broke the search and made us get a new elog software that;s worse than what we had.

 Steve and I switched chiara over to the UPS we bought for it, after ensuring the vacuum system was in a safe state. Everything went without a hitch. 

Also, Diego and I have been working on getting some of the new computers up and running. Zita (the striptool projecting machine) has been replaced. One think pad laptop is missing an HD and battery, but the other one is fine. Diego has been working on a dell laptop, too. I was having problems editing the MAC address rules on the martian wifi router, but the working thinkpad's MAC was already listed. 

 Turns out that, as the martian wifi router is quite old, it doesn't like Chrome; using Firefox worked like a charm and now also giada (the Dell laptop) is on 40MARS.

 So, despite having registered users, it turns out that the "Author" field is still open for editing when making posts. I.e. we don't really need to make new accounts for everyone. 

Thus, I've made a user named "elog" with the old write password that can write to all ELOGs. 

(Also, I've added a user called "jamie")

The BS was showing some excess motion. I think I've fixed it. Order of operations:

• The DC PIT bias from previous ASS runs was at ~500, I zeroed this and aligned the BS to be centered on its oplev QPD with DC alignment sliders
• I squished the gold box cables. This changed the alignment slightly, and brought the UR voltage back to a normal value. Excess motion still existed
• I found that the the C1:SUS-BS_LRSEN filter had HOLD OUTPUT enabled. I turned it off. All seems well. 

I'm not sure how this might have gotten switched on...

 This afternoon, I labelled both ends of this cable, and reconnected it to the MC servo board. 

Two plots from tonight:

Lock loss. Based on the fact that it looked like the DARM servo was running away, Rana posited an effective sign flip in the DARM loop, perhaps due to a parasitic angular feedback mechanism.

While Jenne was probing the IFO at lower powers, we noticed a sudden jump in ASDC. Found the GPS time and fed it to the lockloss plotter. Seems fairly evident that some sudden ETMX motion was to blame. (~2urad kick in yaw)

As Jenne mentioned, I created a model of the DARM OLG to see why we have so little phase margin. However, it turns out I can explain the phase after all.

Chris sent me his work for the aLIGO DARM phase budget, which I adapted for our situation. Here's a stacked-area plot that shows the contributions of various filters and delays on our phase margin, and a real measurement from a few days ago . 

This isn't so great! Informed by Chris's model, the digital delays look like: (Here I'm only listing pure delays, not phase lags from filters)

• 64k cycle (End IOP)
• 16k cycle (End isce[x/y])
• 16k cycle x 2 (end to LSC through RFM) [See ELOG 10811]
• 16k cycle (LSC)
• 16k cycle (LSC to SUS through dolphin) [See ELOG 9881]
• 16k cycle (SUS)
• 16k cycle x2 (SUS to end through RFM)
• 16k cycle (End isce[x/y])
• 64k cycle (SUS IOP)
• DAC zero order hold

This adds up to about 570usec, 20.5 degrees at 100Hz, largely due to the sheer number of computer hops the transmission loops involve. 

As a check, I divided the measured OLG by my model OLG, to see if there is any shape to the residual, that my model doesn't explain. It looks like it fits pretty well. Plot:

So, unless we undertake a bunch of computer work, we can only improve our transmission loops through our control filter design. 

Everything I used to generate these plots is attached. 

I added UGF servos for the DRMI DoFs, after creating a library block for the servos. I also deleted the FMs before the phase rotation, since we can just do it afterwards in other existing FMs. I've only added the MICH and PRCL buttons to the LSC screen because in the end, I feel like a dropdown is better, but I just wanted to get it running quickly tonight. The LSC model and the UGF block have been committed to the svn. 

We were able to use the PRCL UGF servo successfully, as Jenne was exploring MICH offset space. 

I've installed the very fresh ELOG 3.0, for nothing else than the new built in text editor which has a LATEX capable equation editor built right in. 

Check out this sweet limerick: 

The restored offset script used old tdsavg calls that our workstations can't do, and didn't include things like the transmon QPDs. I've written yet another offset script that uses cdsutils averaging to do the thing, and committed to the svn. 

We want to have some angular control of the arms during lock acquistion. 

In single arm lock, Diego and I shook the TMs and measured how the QPDs responded. (I would've liked to do a swept sine in DTT, but the user envelope function still isnt' working!)

For now, we can close simple loops with QPD sensor and ITM actuator, but, as Rana pointed out to Diego and me today, this will drive some amount of the angular cavity degree of freedom that the QPD doesn't sense. So, ideally, we want to come up with the right combination of ITM and ETM motion that lies entirely within the DoF that the QPD senses.

I created a rudimentary loop for Yarm yaw, was able to get ~20Hz for the upper UGF, a few mHz for the lower, but it was starting to leak into the length error signal. Further tweaking will be neccesary...

I've upgraded our cdsutils installation to v382; there have been some changes to pydv which will allow me to implement the auto y-scaling on our lockloss plots. 

After some brief testing, things seem to still work...

Chiara threw another network hissy fit. Dmesg was spammed with a bunch of messages like eth0: link up appearing rapidly. 

Some googling indicated that this error message in conjuction with the very ethernet board and driver that Chiara had in use could be solved by updating with an appropriate driver from the manufacturer.

In essence, I followed steps 1-7 from here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1661489

So far, so good. We'll keep an eye out to see how it works...

I was looking into the status of IPC communications in our realtime network, as Chris suggested that there may be more phase missing that I thought. However, the recent continual red indicators on a few of the models made it hard to tell if the problems were real or not. Thus, I set out to fix what I could, and have achieved full green lights in the CDS screen. 

This required:

• Fixing the BLRMS block, as was found to be a problem in ELOG 9911 (There were just some hanging lines not doing anything)
• Cleaning up one-sided RFM and SHMEM communications in C1SCY, C1TST, C1RFM and C1OAF

The frontend models have been svn'd. The BLRMs block has not, since its in a common cds space, and am not sure what the status of its use at the sites is...

The UGF servos have been moved to the control point, are are once again totally linear!

I've measured the sensing for each of the arms, by using our calibrated oplevs, in terms of QPD counts per micron. It is:

In the absence of a lens, the QPD would be significantly more sensitive to cavity axis translation than tilt, and thus about equally sensitive to ITM and ETM angle. However, there are lenses on the end tables. I didn't go out and look at them, but found some elogs from Annalisa that mentioned 1m focal length lenses. Back-of-the-envelope calculations convince me that this can plausibly lead to the above sensitivity ratios.

I used these quantities to come up with an actuation matrix for the ASC loops, and measured the effective plant seen by the FM, fitted it to some poles( looks like zpk([],-2*pi*[1.47+3.67i,1.47-3.67i],160); ), and designed a control servo. Here is the designed loop:

The servo works on both arms, both DoFs. A DTT measurement agrees with the designed loop shape, up to a few degrees, which are probably due to the CDS delay. The RMS of the QPD error signals goes down by about 20dB, and are currently dominated by the bounce mode, so maybe we can try to sneak in some resonant gain...?

Once we confirm that they work when locking, we can write up and down lines into the locking scripts...

PMC realigned again... The transmission was down to 0.70, and the MC was having a hard time trying to autolock.

EDIT: Sleepy Eric doesn't understand loops. The conditions for this observation included active oplev loops. Thus, obviously, looking at the in-loop signal after the ASC signl joins the oplev signal will produce this kind of behavior. 

After some talking with Rana, I set out on making an even better-er QPD loop. I made some progress on this, but a new mystery halted my progress. 

I sought to have a more physical undertanding of the plant TF I had measured. Earlier, I had assumed that the 4Hz plant features I had measured for the QPD loops were coming from the oplev-modified pendulum response, but this isn't actually consistent with the loop algebra of the oplev servos. I had seen this feature in both the oplev and qpd error signals when pushing an excitation from the ASC-XARM_PIT (and so forth) FMs. 

However, when exciting via the SUS-ETMX-OLPIT FMs (and so forth), this feature would not appear in either the QPD or oplev error signals. That's weird. The outputs of these two FMs should just be summed, right before the coil matrix. 

I started looking at the TF from ASC-YARM_PIT_OUT to SUS-ETMY_TO_COIL_1_2, which should be a purely digital signal routing of unity, and saw it exhibit the phase shape at 4Hz that I had seen in earlier measurements. Here it is:

I am very puzzled by all of this.  Needs more investigation.

Herein, I will try to paint a more thorough picture of this whole QPD ASC mess. 

Motivation for QPD ASC loops:

• We would like to use the QPDs as a DC arm pointing reference during locking attempts, or over multiple days, if possible. 
• It would be nice if the QPDs could complement the oplevs to reduce angular motion of the cavity. 
• We must not make the single arm longnitudinal noise or RIN worse, because anything observable in the single arm case will be catastrophic at full sensitivity

Actuation design:

As mentioned in a previous ELOG, in single arm lock, I measured the QPD response with respect to the calibrated oplev signals. They were:

For reference, one microradian of either ITM or ETM motion produces about 60um of ETM beam spot displacement, compared to the spot size of ~5mm. 

However, given the lenses on the end tables that are used for green mode matching, that the IR transmitted beam also passes through, the QPDs are not directly imaging the ETM spot position; if they were, they would have equal sensitivity to ITM and ETM motion due to our flat/curved arm geometry. 

From this data, I calculated the actuation coefficients for each DoF as , and similarly for the ITMs, where the d's come from the table above. However, it occurs to me that maybe this isn't the way to go... I'll mention this later. 

Loop design:

Up until now, at every turn, I had not properly been thinking about how the oplev loop plays into all of this. I went to the foton filters, and grabbed the loop and plant models for the ETMY oplev, and constructed the closed loop gain, 1/1+G, and the modified plant, P/1+G, which is what the ASC loop sees as its plant. 

Here, the purple trace explains all of the features I was confused about earlier. 

With this in hand, I set up to design a loop to satisfy our motivations. 

• Bounce/roll mode notches to avoid exciting them
• 1/f UGF crossing at a few Hz, limited by the gain margin at ~10Hz, which is where the phase will hit 180, due to the notches
• 4th order Elliptic lowpass at 100, to avoid contaminating the longnitudinal signals
• 1/f^2 at low frequencies for DC gain

To do this, I inverted the oplev closed loop plant pole around 4Hz to smooth the whole thing out. Here's a comparison of the measured OLG with what I modelled. 

There's a little bit of phase discrepency around 10Hz, but I think it looks about right overall. 

Evaluation:

So, here's the part that counts: How does this actually perform? I took spectra of the QPD error signals, the relevant OpLev signals as out of loop sensors, the PDH error signal and transmitted RIN while single arm locked, with this loop off, and on for all 4 DoFs simultaneously. 

Verdict:

• In-loop signals get small, unsurprisingly.
• Cavity signals unchanged. 
• ITM oplev signals are unchanged (and not plotted, to not clutter the plots (This isn't surprising since the loops mostly actuate on the ETMs).
• ETM oplev signals get smaller around the 3Hz peak, but are louder in other bands. 

This is what makes me think I may need to revisit the actuation matrix. If I did it wrong, I am driving the "invisible" quadrant of the cavity angular DoFs, and this could be what is injecting noise into the oplevs. 

Conclusion:

In the end, I have a better understanding of what is going on, and I don't think we're quite there yet.  

Although the QPD loops are less than ideal right now, I made changes to the ASC model to trigger the QPD loops on and off politely, depending on TRX and TRY. The settings are exposed on the ASC screen. However, I have not yet exposed the FM triggering that I also set up to make sure the integrator doesn't misbehave if the arm loses lock. We probably don't want to trigger them on at anything lower than arm powers of about 1.0. 

I've tested the triggering by randomly turning LSC mode on and off, and making sure that the optics don't recieve much of a kick as the QPD loops engage a few seconds after the LSC boosts do, or when lock is lost. This works as long as there isn't much of a DC offset befire the loops are engaged. (Under 20 counts or so is fine)

As a side note, I was going to use the TRIG_SIG signals sent via the LSC model via SHMEM blocks for the ASC triggering, but oddly, the data streams that made it over were actually the MICH and SRCL TRIG_SIGs, instead of XARM and YARM as labelled. I double checked the simulink diagrams; everything seemed fine to me. In any case, ASS was already recieving TRX and TRY directly via RFM, so I just piped those over to the ASC block. This way is probably better anyways, because it directly references the arm powers, instead of the less obvious LSC triggering matrix. 

Since Rana's overhaul of the IMC, the FSS input offset had been sitting at zero. 

Over the last day or so, I had noticed the MC refl wall striptool trace looking noisier, and earlier this evening, we were suffering from a fair amount of downtime due to IMC unlocks, and failure to autolock for times on the order of ten minutes. 

While we had used ezcaservo for this in the past, I set the FSS offset manually tonight. Namely, I popped open a dataviewer trace of MC_F, and scanned the FSS offset to make MC_F go to zero. It required a good amount of offset, 4.66 V according to the FSS screen. I did this while the FSS slow servo was on, which held the FSS Fast output at zero. 

That was four hours ago; MC_F is still centered on zero, and we have not had a single IMC unlock since then. The MC refl trace is thinner too, though this may be from nighttime seismic. 

It does appear to work here. However, I've since supplanted TFSR785 and SPSR785 with SRmeasure, which has some simpler command line options for directly downloading a manually configured measurement. I've also set up a git repository for the gpib scripts I've done at https://github.com/e-q/netgpibdata, which could be easier than grabbing the whole 40m directory. 

The MC autolocker hasn't been so snappy recently, and has been especially fussy today. Previously, the mcup script was triggered immediately once the transmission was above a certain threshold. However, this could waste time if it was just an errant flash. Hence, I've added a 0.5 second delay and a second threshold check before mcup is triggered. 

After breaking the lock 5ish times, it does seem to come back quicker.

[ericq, Diego]

Tonight, we transitioned CARM from ALS directly to REFL11 I at 25% Mich Offset.

We attempted the transition twice, the first time worked, but we lost lock ~5 seconds after full transition due to a sudden ~400Hz ringup (see attached lockloss plot). The second barfed halfway, I think because I forgot to remove the CARM B offset from the first time 

The key to getting to zero CARM offset with CARM and DARM on ALS is ekeing out every bit of PRMI phase margin that you can. Neither MICH nor PRCL had their RG filters on and I tweaked the MICH LP to attenuate less and give back more phase (the HF still isn't the dominant RMS source.) PRCL had ~60 degrees phase margin at 100Hz UGF, MICH had ~50 deg at 47Hz UGF. The error signals were comparitively very noisy, but we only cared that they held on. Also important was approaching zero slooooooooowly, and having the CARM and DARM UGF servo excitations off, because they made everything go nuts. Diego stewarded the MICH and PRCL excitation amplitudes admirably. 

Oddly, and worringly, the arm powers at zero CARM offset were only around 10-12. Our previous estimations already include the high Xarm loss, so I'm not sure what's going on with this. Maybe we need to measure our recycling gain?

I hooked up the SR785 by the LSC rack to the CM board after the first success. For the second trial, I also took TFs with respect to CM slow, but they looked nowhere near as clean as the normal REFL11 I channel; I didn't really check all the connections. I will be revisiting the whole AO situation soon. 

In any case, I think we're getting close...