Found the Marconi for the 11 MHz source had been reset to its default.

 => reset the parameters. f = 11.065910 MHz (see #5530) amp = 13 dBm.

Interferometer became lockable. I checked the X/Y arm lock, and MICH lock, they all are fine.

I failed to start Rana's favorit anciant desktop computer at the vac rack. He has to baby this old beast just a little bit more.

Vacuum status: Vac Normal was reached through Farfalla: Rga was switched back to IFO and and Annuloses are beeing pumped now.

V1 was closed for about a day and the pressure reached  ~2.8 mTorr in the IFO.  This leakrate plus outgassing is normal

The ref cavity 5000V was turned on.

The only thing that has to be done is to restart the RGA. I forgat to turn it off on Friday.

 As it turns out Steve is not crazy in this particular instance: the vacuum computer, linux3 , has some issues. I can login just fine, but trying to open a terminal makes the CPU rail and the RAM max out and eventually the machine freezes.

Under KDE, I can open a terminal OK as root, but if I then try a 'su controls', the same issue happens. Let's wait for Jamie to fix this.

Restarted Apache on nodus using Yoichi's wiki instructions. SVN is back up.

The following is a message from the LIGO 40m Chief Recycling Officer:

Please get up off your (Alignment Stabilization Servo)es and recycle your bottles and cans!  There is a recycling bin in the control room.  Recent weeks have seen an increase in number of bottles/cans thrown away in the regular garbage.  This is not cool. 

Thank you,

---L4mCRO

 Going off some discussion we had at lunch today, here is my current knowledge of the state of cavity lengths. 

Acknowledging that Koji changed the sideband modulation frequency recently, the ideal cavity lengths are (to the nearest mm):

• Lprc = c / ( 4 * fmod) = 6.773 m
• Lsrc = c / ( 5 * fmod) = 5.418 m

We when last hand measured distances, after moving PR2, we found:

• Lprc  = 6.752 m = 2.1 cm short
• Lsrc  = 5.474 m = 5.6 cm long. 

However, when I looked at the sideband splitting interferometrically, I found:

• Lprc = 6.759m = 1.4 cm short

This is only 5mm from the hand measured value, so we can believe that the SRC length is between 5 and 6 cm too long. I'm building a MIST model to try and see what this may entail. 

Com'on. This is just a 60ppm change of the mod frequency from the nominal. How can it change the recycling cav length by more than a cm?

https://wiki-40m.ligo.caltech.edu/IFO_Modeling/RC_lengths

This describes how the desirable recycling cavity lengths are affected by the phase of the sidebands at non-resonant reflection of the arms.

If we believe these numbers, L_PRC = 6.7538 [m] and L_SRC = 5.39915 [m].

Compare them with the measured numbers

• Lprc = 6.752 m
• Lsrc  = 5.474 m

You should definitely run MIST to see what is the optimal length of the RCs, and what is the effect of the given length deviations.

Koji correctly points out that I naïvely overlooked various factors. With a similar analysis to the wiki page, I get:

• Ideal arm length of 37.795 m
• Ideal PRC length of 6.753 m
• Ideal SRC length of 5.399 m

This means that:

• The PRC, measured at 6.759m, is 6mm long. 
• The SRC, measured at 5.474m, is 7.5 cm long

Next step is to see how this may affect our ability to sense, and thereby control, the SRC when the arms are going. 

MIST simulations and plots are in the attached zip. 

I looked at the data of the day before yesterday (Oct 06) to know how much is the recycling gain.

X arm: (TRX_PRecycled) / (TRX_PRMmisaligned) * T_PRM = 83.1/0.943*0.07 = 6.17
Y arm: (TRX_PRecycled) / (TRX_PRMmisaligned) * T_PRM = 99.2/1.017*0.07 = 6.83

==> G_PR = 6.5 +/- 0.5     (oh...this estimation is so bad...)

From the recycling gain and the arm cavity reflectance, one can get the loss in the recycling cavity.

G_PR = T_PRM  / (1-Sqrt(R_PRM * (1-L_PRC)*R_cav))^2

==> loss in the recycling cavity L_PRC: 0.009+/-0.009
       (About 1% loss is likely in the recycling cavity)

I put all three seismometers and all six accelerometers together in the foam box with peanuts. Three of the accelerometers are facing in the x-direction and three are in the y-direction. Both Guralps are aligned on the NS axis and the Ranger is pointing vertically.

**EDIT: The accelerometers are in the x and z directions, not x and y. Sorry, I was sleepy when I wrote this.**

One of the accelerometers was refusing to show anything, and after a few hours of checking connections and swapping cables, I discovered that someone had unplugged the cable from the ADC. A quick glance in the dataviewer shows that the channel has been unplugged since about 3 in the afternoon on August 8th (Saturday). So... obviously all the accelerometer measurements made with that channel since then did not actually get recorded. Yay.

Anyway, as of 2:45, everything is working and taking data. Clearly we're not getting a full night's worth... hopefully that's okay.

I noticed that our current suspension damping loops for the new SOS were railing the DAC outputs. The reason being that cts2um module has not been updated for most optics and thus teh OSEM signal (with the new Sat Amps) is about 30 times stronger. That means our usual intuition of damping gains is too high without applying correct conversion cts2um filter module. I reduced all these gains today and nothing is overflowing the c1su2 chassis now. I also added two options in the "!" (command running drop down menu) in the sus_single medm screens for opening ndscope for monitoring coil outputs or OSEM inputs of the optic whose sus screen is used.

We're trying to reduce the demodulated error signals after running the ASS script for the XARM.

After running the ASS script, we initially tried to play around with the with the EXC Gain and brought all of them down to 300. It didn't make a huge difference on the error signals or the transmission signal. We then tried tweaking the XARM_OUT_MTRX by flipping the signs/changing the magnitude but it mostly just made things worse. We then changed that matrix to closely resemble the YARM_OUT_MTRX (structurally). At an XARM GAIN of about 0.02, with the EXC Gains at 300 and the XARM_SEN_MTRX having 1.00 on the diagonal terms, the error signals slowly started converging to 0. However, X_ARM_ETM_PIT_L_DEMOD_I_OUT16 kept oscillating which wasn't good.

We later tried looking at the spectrum for the demodulated signals to see if there were any peaks at frequencies outside of the delmodulating frequencies. Most of them looked consistent with peaks at demodulation frequencies (and modes) and signal input frequencies (60Hz and modes). We compared the spectrum with the YARM where everything was optimized, there were no noticable differences.

Later in the day, both XARM and YARM lost lock a couple of times for reasons unknown. We restored to an earlier point in the day (12:00) suspecting there was misalignment with the input optics.

THE XARM ASS MYSTERY REMAINS.

[Radhika, Murtaza]

XARM ASS

We resumed playing around with ASS for XARM. We approached each error signal one at a time to try to determine the sign of actuation and ensure the error was reduced.

Steps:

Next steps:

1. Resume nailing down the "fast" control by using ITM transmission error signal to feedback to ITM

2. Add in "slow" pointing control by feeding back ETM LSC error (centering) to BS.

     *NOTE* We tried to do this before feeding back any ITM error signal, but this immediately caused transmission to drop because ITM had no way to adjust to new input pointing.

I recommend usinng the DC offset method that Koji and I used for measuring the IMC WFS sensing matrix (not the AC method that Anchal used). With a sensing matrix, you should be able to do some partial inversion.

Without any sensing matrix inversion, we would have to rely on a gain hierarchy for getting the loops to work.

With some approximate matrix inversion, the loops are more indepedent of each other. Also if you look at the spectrum of the error signals, it should be clear that the sensing noise is pretty large, and so that sets a natural upper limit to the UGFs. We only want integrator (1/f) loops, but the LPFs cause some extra phase lag.

[Radhika, Murtaza]

To create the sensing matrix, we tried the DC offset method by giving offsets in the Pitch and Yaw DOFs for ITMX, ETMX and the BS respectively. The signals we looked at were the demodulated ETMX_L, ETMX_T and ITMX_T. We wrote a quick notebook that does the following things for each DOF:

1. Calculate the mean error signal (over 10s)
2. Give an offset of 3 steps in each DOF corresponding to their step size serially with some buffer time (restoring the offset after each DOF)
3. Calculate the new mean error signal (over 10s)
4. Find the difference in error signals and divide by their respective step sizes to get each sensor's sensitivity to the offset.
5. Invert to obtain the sensing matrix.

Sensing Matrix for Pitch:

=

Sensing Matrix for Yaw:

 = 

*NEED TO TRY THESE OUT*

%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%

The Output Matrix for the from intuition was set to *Attachment 2* which improved the net average transmission (see Attachment 1), but wasn't really stable after the improvement.

[Radhika, Murtaza]

We recalculated the sensing matrix for XARM ASS by collecting each sensor's step response to an offset in each DOF. This produced the following dense output matrix A (see Attachment 1 for rows/cols):

      [[-0.02047695,  0.        , -0.10262752,  0.        , -0.0157128 , 0.        ],
       [ 0.        ,  0.16908344,  0.        , -0.00929291,  0.        ,-0.35916455],
A =    [-0.28050764,  0.        ,  0.26982002,  0.        , -0.55100297, 0.        ],
       [ 0.        ,  0.85501491,  0.        ,  0.0606197 ,  0.        , 0.27568672],
       [-0.95963335,  0.        ,  0.95742611,  0.        ,  0.83435534, 0.        ],
       [ 0.        , -0.49026554,  0.        , -0.99811768,  0.        , 0.89162641]]

Turning the XASS gain up slowly to ~0.15, we observed that several error signals diverged and transmission started to drop. Debugging this matrix proved difficult since there were many nonzero elements to consider. So we reverted to build the matrix from our intuition, considering the centering and input pointing loops, and using the YASS output matrix as a reference.

The YARM ASS servo gains are all +1. The YASS output matrix has the following length (centering) signal mapping:

We mirrored this in the XASS output matrix. Note that previously the ITM L error signals were not used for XASS. To simplify the process, we decided to just work out the beam centering first and ignore the input pointing coming from the beam splitter (setting BS PIT/YAW matrix elements to 0). We also set all the XARM ASS servo gains to +1. See the output matrix below:

We cleared the outputs and turned on the XARM GAIN slowly (0.1) and immediately noticed the YAW signals in ETM start to diverge (C1:ASS-XARM_ETM_YAW_T_DEMOD_I_OUT16, C1:ASS-XARM_ETM_YAW_L_DEMOD_I_OUT16). We turned down the XARM gain and flipped the sign for the signal going to ETM YAW. (suspect a difference in sign convention).

To check the stability, we sequentially gave offsets in PIT/YAW for ETM and ITM. We saw the signal (C1:ASS-XARM_ETM_PIT_L_DEMOD_I_OUT16) oscillate wildly at a frequency of ~(1/15 Hz). We suspected the ASS loop was driving these oscillations so we turned down the gain going to ETM PIT to 0.25 which worked really well and the transient oscillation of further checks was gone.

We saw similar wild oscillatory signals in ITM PIT (C1:ASS-XARM_ITM_PIT_T_DEMOD_I_OUT16, C1:ASS-XARM_ITM_PIT_L_DEMOD_I_OUT16) on applying offsets so we reduced the gain going to ITM PIT to 0.3. (0.25 and 0.3 are arbitary relatively smaller weights, can be fine tuned).

We checked the stability of this setup as a whole by giving a few offsets to ITMX and ETMX, with a servo gain of 0.15 it did a great job! (0.25 made it diverge once again). See final state for centering in Attachment 1, and error signal suppression in Attachment 2. (Ignore XAUX transmission in grey - we were toggling the shutter.) Note that the Length error signals were successfully suppressed, but the dark green/brown Transmission error signals were not fed back and thus remain nonzero.

WE SHALL INVESTIGATE THE INPUT POINTING NEXT FEEDING BACK TO THE BS and ITMX. We will give an update shortly about whether restoring XARM ASS is feasible by Monday.

[Radhika, Murtaza]

This post summarizes XARM ASS efforts from Friday 9/8 and Saturday 9/9.

FRIDAY

On Friday, we continued with our previous output matrix that used the length error signals (ITM/ETM PIT/YAW L) to feed back to ITMX and ETMX (see the previous ELOG). In that state we did not use the transmission error signals and had no feedback going to the BS. We then tried to use the transmission error signals ITM PIT/YAW L as a proxy for BS input pointing and feed them back to the BS. For both PIT and YAW, both signs of feedback resulted in diverging T error signals and a decrease in transmission.

SATURDAY

On Saturday, we used the transmission error signals (ITM/ETM PIT/YAW T) in the sensing matrix to build the output matrix. We got it to a state where we could get the controlled error signals to converge by just feeding back to the ITMX and ETMX (Attachments 1,2). Once we had this working, we tried to feed back a combination of (ETM PIT/YAW L and ITM PIT/YAW T) to correct BS pointing. However, any combinations and signs to the BS dropped transmission and led to diverging error signals.
We then attempted to use the latest working XASS output matrix (before the acromags were pulled out) and see the effect of flipping signs in there (one optic+DOF at a time) We then tried to use the sign logic from the previously working ETM/ITM feedback we got partially working; however the error signals did not converge with any combination.

SUMMARY:

- We are able to successfully feed back to ITMX and ETMX, using either length or transmission error signals. It is when we try to add BS feedback that ASS fails. This can be due to the fact that we need to consider the relative servo gains when treating these loops separately, like Koji mentioned.

- The sensing matrix approach might be the only way to simultaneously optimize feedback for all optics, avoiding the need to tune servo gains. We will revisit this approach on Monday.

     - Koji pointed out that we are reading out the low-passed error signals in order to calculate each step response - we will need to consider our sampling rate and duration of averaging accordingly.

     - It will be harder to iteratively flip signs of each matrix element for this dense matrix, and we will have to be clever about which sign combinations we try for actuation.

[Radhika, Murtaza, Paco]

Today we decided to take a closer look at the demod phases of the T and L error signals for XARM ASS. By eye we tuned the phases to minimize the signal in Q. Here are the new demod phases:
(THE DEMODULATION PHASE VALUE DO NOT RESTORE BACK TO THE ORIGINAL VALUES WHEN DITHER IS TURNED ON.)

We also noticed that MEDM indicator for dithering on (white --> green LO symbol) for ETM_YAW_L_OSC was tied to the wrong excitation gain channel (C1:ASS-XARM_ITM_YAW_OSC_CLKGAIN instead of C1:ASS-XARM_ETM_YAW_OSC_CLKGAIN). We went ahead and changed this in [insert medm file location]. So now the right green LO symbol appears when the appropriate excitation is turned on.

I resumed work to restore XARM ASS

I manually aligned XARM and calculated the output matrix using scripts/ASS/getASSOutMat.py. This script gives an offset to the ETM/ITM/BS in pitch and yaw and records all error signals to construct a sensing matrix (8 err signals x 6 actuators). Then the ITMX PIT/YAW L error signal rows are removed (as per XASS historical practice) and the resulting square matrix is inverted.

A few times I loaded the output matrix and turned up the ASS servo gain, but this caused error signals to diverge and transmission to drop. I realigned XARM in between each time and recalcuated the output matrix until one looked promising [Attachment 1].

- From a decently aligned state, the servo maintained transmission and controlled error signals began to converge to 0.

- However when I gave an offset to some optic, transmission started to recover but then dropped even as all controlled error signals were minimized [Attachment 2]. A zoomed version of this is in Attachment 3.

     - ITMX PIT L (light blue) / ITMX YAW L (light pink) are uncontrolled

     - ETMX PIT L (dark blue) has a ~0.2 Hz oscillation, but its mean error is roughly 0. This behavior has been present since XASS stopped working, but it is yet to be understood.

The output matrix is successfully reducing the error signals it controls, but transmission is not maximized. I wonder if it's stuck in a local minimum, but I haven't convinced myself that these error signals can be 0 when the beam spots aren't centeredand cavity/beam axes aren't matched. Maybe we need to use the ITMX PIT/YAW L error signals.

Things to try:

1. Assume pitch and yaw are decoupled and calculate a checkerboard output matrix, and debug each angular DOF at a time. I briefly did this today and got the pitch loop to increase transmission, but not the yaw loop.

2. Altering the sensing matrix to include ITMX PIT/YAW L error signals. Then I'll use the same script to compute the output matrix.

I am using a PDA255 photodiode to measure the power outputted by the NPRO beam on the PSL table. (I'm going to then use a network analyzer to measure the amplitude response of the PZT to being driven at a range of frequencies. I'll detect the variation in in response to changing the driving frequency using this PDA255.)

The PDA255 has an active area of 0.8mm^2 and a maximum intensity for which the response is linear of 10mW/cm^2. This means that a beam I focus on the PD must have a power less than 0.08 mW (and even less if the spot size is smaller than the window size).

I used a power meter to measure the beam power and found it was 0.381 mW.

The second polarizing beam splitter in the setup transmits most of the beam power, but reflects 0.04 mW (according to the power meter). I'm going to place the photodiode there in the path of the reflected beam.

[Alberto, Jenne]

We aligned both the reference cavity and the PMC, each by looking at their Trans PD on Davaviewer, and adjusting the two steering mirrors to maximize the transmission power.  We got a pretty good amount of improvement for the ref cav, but since the PMC hasn't decayed a whole lot, we got a much smaller amount of improvement.

After Alberto and I worked on aligning the reference cavity, Rob asked the important and useful question: what is the visibility of the reference cavity.  This helps tell us if we're optimally aligned or not even close.

I did a scan of the ref cav temperature, using /scripts/PSL/FSS/SLOWscan, but there seems to be no real signal is C1:PSL-FSS_RFPDDC.  As shown in Alberto's 200-day plot, it does change sometimes, but if you zoom in on the flat parts, it seems like it's not really reading anything meaningful.  I did a cursory check-out of it, but I'm not 100% sure where to go from here:  There are (as with all of these gold-box PDs) 3 outputs:  a ribbon cable (for ADC purposes I think), an SMA for the RF signal, and a BNC for the DC signal.  The photodiode is clearly working, since if you stick the Lollypop in front of the PD, the cavity unlocks.  I plugged a 'scope into the DC BNC, and it also behaves as expected: block the beam and the signal goes down; unblock the beam and the signal goes up.  Something of note is that this readout gives a positive voltage, which decreases when the beam is blocked.  However, looking at the dataviewer channel, nothing at all seems to happen when the beam is blocked/unblocked.  So the problem lies somewhere in the get-signal-to-DAQ path.  I unplugged and replugged in the ribbon cable, and the value at which the channel has been stuck changed.  Many days ago, the value was -0.5, for the last few days it's been -1.5, and after my unplug/replug, it's now back to ~ -0.5 . The other day Alberto mentioned, and made the point again today that it's a little weird that the PD reads out a negative voltage.  Hmm.

Do we have a tester-cable, so that instead of the ribbon cable, I can plug that connector (or pins thereof) into a 'scope?

we have a tester cable, but you don't want it. Instead the problem is probably at the cross-connect. The D-cable goes to a cross-connect and you can probe there with a voltmeter. If the signal is good there, trace it to the ADC. Also trend for several years to see when this happened - Yoichi may know the history better.

Also, we still need to complete the FSS RFPD task list from last year.

 [Jenne, Ben]

I called in the reinforcements today.  Ben came over and we looked all around at all of the cross-connects and cables relating to the FSS.  Everything looks pretty much okey-dokey, except that we still weren't getting signal in the DataViewer channels.  Finally we looked at the psl.db file, which indicates that the C1:PSL-FSS_RFPDDC channel looks at channel 21 of the ADC cross connect thing.  We followed the cable which was plugged into this, and it led to a cable which was disconnected, but laying right next to the Ref Cav refl PD.  We plugged this into the DC out SMA connection of the photodiode (which had not been connected to anything), and suddenly everything was mostly golden again in dataviewer land.  RFPDDC_F now has a signal, but RFPDDC is still flat. 

Even though this seems to be working now, it's still not perfect.  Rob suggested that instead of having this SMA cable going from the photodiode's DC out, we should take the signal from the ribbon cable.  So I'm going to figure out which pin of the D-connector is the DC out, and take that from the cross connect to the ADC cross connect.  This will help avoid some persnickity ground loops. 

I turned the RefCav heater and servo back on a couple days ago. At first it was stabilizing again at a low setpoint, but in reality the right temperature (~40 C). After fixing the in-loop signal offsets, the setpoint now correctly reflects the actual temperature.

Jenny is going to calibrate the sensors using some kind of dunking cannister next week.

We wanted to re-activate the Heater for the reference cavity today to use it as a testbed for PID autotuning and the new heater driver circuit that Andrew is working on for the coating thermal noise experiment.

Unfortunately, it seems that the large power supply which is used for the heater is dead. Or maybe I don't remember how to use it?

The AC power cord was plugged in to a power strip which seems to work for IO chassis. We also tried swapping power strip ports.

We checked the front panel fuses. The power one was 3 Ohms and the 'bias' one was 55 Ohms. We also checked that the EPICS slider did, in fact, make voltage changes at the bias control input.

Non of the front panel lights come on, but I also don't remember if that is normal.

Have those lights been dead a long time? We also reconnected the heater cable at the reference cavity side.

Rana and I

1) took the temperature sensors off the reference cavity;

2) wrapped copper foil around the cavity (during which I learned it is REALLY easy to cut hands with the foil);

3) wrapped electrical tape around the power terminals of the temperature sensors (color-coded, too! Red for the out of loop sensor, Blue for the first one, Brown for the second, Gray for the third, and Violet for the fourth. Yes, we went with an alphabetical coding system, excluding the out of loop sensor);

4) re-wrapped the thermal blanket heater;

5) covered the ends of the cavities with copper, ensuring that the beam can enter and exit;

6) took pretty pictures for your enjoyment!

We will see if this helps the temperature stabilization of the reference cavity.

The end of the reference cavity, with a lovely square around the beam.

The entire, well-wrapped reference cavity!

From the trend, it seems that the Reference Cavity's temperature servo is working fine with the new copper foil. I was unable to find the insulating foam anywhere, but that's OK. We'll just get Frank to make us a new insulation with his special yellow stuff.

The copper foil that Steve got is just the right thickness for making it easy to form around the vacuum can, but we just have to have the patience to wrap ~5-10 more layers on there. We also have to get a new heater jacket; this one barely fits around the outside of the copper wrap. The one we have now seems to have a good heating wire pattern, but I don't know where we can buy these.

I also turned the HEPA's Variac back down to the nominal value of 20. Please remember to turn it back up to 100 before working on the PSL.

This is the trend so far with the copper foil wrapping. According to Megan's calculation, we need ~1 mm of foil and the thickness of each layer is 0.002" (1/20th of a mm), so we need ~20 layers. We have ~5 layers so far.

As you can see the out-of-loop temperature sensor (RCTEMP) is much better than before. We need another week to tell how well the frequency is doing -

the recent spate of power cycles / reboots of the PSL have interrupted the trend smoothness so far.

I wrapped another ~3 layers onto there. It occurs to me now that we could just get some 2mm thick copper plates made to fit over the stainless steel can.

They don't have to completely cover it, just mostly. I also took the copper circles that Steve had made and marked them with the correct beam height

and put them on Steve's desk. We need a 1" dia. hole cut into these on Monday.

To compensate for the cooling during my work, I've set the heater for max heating for 1 hour and then to engage the temperature servo.

I also noticed the HEPA VARIAC on the PSL was set to 100. Please set it back to 20 after completing your PSL work so that it doesn't disturb the RC temperature..

[Rana, Alberto]

This evening we measured the noise spectrum of the reference cavity PD used in the FSS loop. From that we estimated the transimpedance and found that the PD is shot-noise limited. We also found a big AM oscillation in correspondence of the FSS modulation sideband which we later attenuated at least in part.

1. Supposing that the laser beam hitting the PD was shot noise limited, we measured 1.1V at the DC output. That let us estimate the photocurrent at DC of 20mA, for a 50Ohm output impedance.
2. The shot noise for 20mA is 80 pA/rtHz
3. From the nosie spectrum, we measured 3e-7 v/rtHz at 21.5MHz
4. The impedance at RF is then Z_rf = 3e-7 V/rtHz / 80e-12 pA ~ 4000 Ohm
5. Since the RF path inside the PD has a gain of 10, the transimpedance is ~400Ohm, which is about as we (ie Rana) remembered it to be.
6. The PD seems to be working fine.

Some more words about the RFAM: I noticed that there was an excess RFAM by unlocking the RC and just looking at the RF out with the 50 Ohm input of the scope. It was ~100 mVp-p! In the end our method to minimize the AM was not so sensible - we aligned the waveplate before the EOM so as to minimize the p-pol light transmitted by the PBS cube just ahead of the AOM. At first, this did not minimize the RFAM. But after I got angry at the bad plastic mounting of the EOM and re-aligned it, the AM seemed to be small with the polarization aligned to the cube. It was too small to measure on the scope and on the spectrum analyzer, the peak was hopping around by ~10-20 dB on a few second timescale. Further reduction would require some kind of active temperature stabilization of the EOM housing (maybe a good SURF project!).

For the EOM mount we (meaning Steve) should replace the lame 2-post system that's in there with one of the mounts of the type that is used in the Mach-Zucker EOMs. I think we have spare in the cabinet next to one of the arms.

After the RFAM monkeying, I aligned the beam to the RC using the standard, 2-mirror, beam-walking approach. You can see from the attached plot that the transmission went up by ~20% ! And the reflection went down by ~30%. I doubt that I have developed any new alignment technique beyond what Yoichi and I already did last time. Most likely there was some beam shape corruption in the EOM, or the RFAM was causing us to lock far off the fringe. Now the reflected beam from the reference cavity is a nice donut shape and we could even make it better by doing some mode matching! This finally solves the eternal mystery of the bad REFL beam (or at least sweeps it under the rug).

At the end, I also fixed the alignment of the RFPD. It should be set so the incident angle of the beam is ~20-40 deg, but it was instead set to be near normal incidence ?! Its also on flimsy plastic legs. Steve, can you please replace this with the new brass ones?

The units on this plot are completely bogus - we know that the thermal noise from the resonant part of the circuit is just V = sqrt(4*k*T*Z) ~ 3nV/rHz. Then the gain of the MAX4107 stage is 10. The output resistor is 50 Ohms, which forms a divide by 2 with the input impedance of the spectrum analyzer and so the bump in the dark noise should only be 15 nV/rHz and not microVolts.

 I was aware of a problem on those units since I acquired the data. Then it wasn't totally clear to me which were the units of the data as downloaded from the Agilent 4395A, and, in part, still isn't.

It's clear that the data was in units of spectrum, an not spectral density: in between the two there is a division by the bandwidth (100KHz, in this case). Correcting for that, one gets the following plot for the FSS PD:

Although the reason why I was hesitating to elog this other plot is that it looks like there's still a discrepancy of about 0.5dBm between what one reads on the display of the spectrum analyzer and the data values downloaded from it.

However I well know that, I should have just posted it, including my reserves about that possible offset (as I'm doing now).

 Teflon feet removed and heavy brass-delrin pd base installed. Ref-cavity reflected light remains to be beautiful doughnut shape on camera.

Summary: This afternoon we managed to get the temperature control of the reference cavity working again.

We bypassed the MINCO PID by connecting the temperature box error signal directly into EPICS.

We couldn't configure the PID so that it worked with the modified temperature box so we decided to just avoid using it.

Now the temperature control is done by a software servo by using the channel C1:PSL-FSS_MINCOMEAS as error signal and driving C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALSET (which we have clip-doodle wired directly to the heater input).

We 'successfully' used ezcaservo to stabilize the temperature:

ezcaservo -r C1:PSL-FSS_MINCOMEAS -s 26.6 -g -0.00003 C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALSET

We also recalibrated the channels:

C1:PSL-FSS_RMTEMP

C1:PSL-FSS_RCTEMP

C1:PSL-FSS_MINCOMEAS

with Peter King on the phone by using ezcawrite (EGUF and EGUL) but we didn't change the database yet. So please do not reboot the PSL computer until we update the database.

More details will follow.

I made the changes to the psl.db to handle the new Temperature box hardware. The calibrations (EGUF/EGUL) are just copied directly from the LHO .db file (I have rsync'd their entire target area to here).

allegra:c1psl>diff psl.db~ psl.db
341,353d340
< grecord(ai,"C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALOUT")
< {
<       field(DESC,"TIDALOUT- drive to the reference cavity heater")
<       field(DISV,"1")
<         field(SCAN,".5 second")
<       field(DTYP,"VMIVME-3113")
<       field(INP,"#C0 S28 @")
<       field(EGUF,"10")
<       field(EGUL,"-10")
<       field(EGU,"volts")
<       field(LOPR,"-10")
<       field(AOFF,"0")
< }
493,494c480,481
<         field(EGUF,"285.675")
<         field(EGUL,"-214.325")
---
>         field(EGUF,"67.02")
>         field(EGUL,"7.96")
508,509c495,496
<         field(EGUF,"726.85")
<         field(EGUL,"-1273.15")
---
>         field(EGUF,"75.57")
>         field(EGUL,"12.31")
531,532c518,519
<         field(EGUF,"726.85")
<         field(EGUL,"-1273.15")
---
>         field(EGUF,"75.57")
>         field(EGUL,"12.31")
605,617d591
< grecord(ai,"C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALINPUT")
< {
<       field(DESC,"TIDALINPUT- tidal actuator input")
<       field(DISV,"1")
<         field(SCAN,".5 second")
<       field(DTYP,"VMIVME-3123")
<       field(INP,"#C0 S3 @")
<       field(EGUF,"10")
<       field(EGUL,"-10")
<       field(EGU,"volts")
<       field(LOPR,"-10")
<       field(AOFF,"0")
< }
1130a1105,1130
> grecord(ai,"C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALINPUT")
> {
>       field(DESC,"TIDALINPUT- tidal actuator input")
>       field(DISV,"1")
>         field(SCAN,".5 second")
>       field(DTYP,"VMIVME-3123")
>       field(INP,"#C0 S3 @")
>       field(EGUF,"10")
>       field(EGUL,"-10")
>       field(EGU,"volts")
>       field(LOPR,"-10")
>       field(AOFF,"0")
> }
> grecord(ai,"C1:PSL-FSS_TIDALOUT")
> {
>       field(DESC,"TIDALOUT- drive to the reference cavity heater")
>       field(DISV,"1")
>         field(SCAN,".5 second")
>       field(DTYP,"VMIVME-3113")
>       field(INP,"#C0 S28 @")
>       field(EGUF,"10")
>       field(EGUL,"-10")
>       field(EGU,"volts")
>       field(LOPR,"-10")
>       field(AOFF,"0")
> }
1143,1144c1143,1144
<         field(HOPR,"0.010")
<         field(LOPR,"-0.010")
---
>         field(HOPR,"2")
>         field(LOPR,"0")

[HV pulse] ----+           +-->-- [PD2]
               V           |
->--[HWP]->-- [EOM] -->-- [PBS] --<->-- [QWP] --<->-- [Reference Cavity] -->-- [PD1]
                           |
                [PD3] --<--+

We succeeded in getting the reflected green beam from both ITMY and ETMY.

After we did several things on the end table, we eventually could observe these reflections.

Now the spot size of the reflection from ITMY is still big ( more than 1 cm ), so tomorrow modematching to the 40m cavity is going to be improved by putting mode matching telescopes on right positions.

An important thing we found is that, the beam height of optics which directly guides the beam to the cavity should be 4.5 inch on the end table.

(what we did)

* Aidan, Kevin and Kiwamu set the beam to be linearly polarized by rotating a QWP in front of the Innolight. This was done by monitoring the power of the transmitted light from the polarizer attached on the input of the Faraday of 1064 nm. Note that the angle for QWP is 326.4 deg.

* We put some beam damps against the rejected beam from the Faraday

* To get a good isolation with the Faraday we at first rotated the polarization of the incident beam so to have a minimum transmission. And then we rotated the output polarizer until the transmission reaches a minimum. Eventually we got the transmission of less than 1mW, so now the Faraday should be working regardless of the polarization angle of the incident beam. As we predicted, the output polaerizer seems to be rotated 45 deg from that of the input.

* Rana, Koji and Kiwamu aligned the PPKTP crystal to maximize the power of 532 nm.  Now the incident power of 1064 nm is adjusted to 250mW and the output power for 532 nm is 0.77mW. Actually we can increase the laser power by rotating a HWP in front of the Faraday.

* We injected the green beam to the chamber and aligned the beam axis to the ETMY without the modematching lenses, while exciting the horizontal motion of the ETM with f=1Hz from awg. This excitation was very helpful because we could figure out which spot was the reflection from the ETM.

* Once we made the reflected beam going close to the path of the incident beam, we then put the modematching lenses and aligned the steering mirrors and lenses. At this time we could see the reflected beam was successfully kicked away by the Faraday of 532 nm.

* Koji went to ITMY chamber with a walkie-talkie and looked at the spot position. Then he told Rana and Kiwamu to go a right direction with the steering mirrors. At last we could see a green beam from ITM illuminating the ETM cage.

* We excited the ITMY with f=2Hz vertically and aligned the ITM from medm. Also we recovered a video monitor which was abandoned around ETMY chamber so that we could see the spot on the ETM via the monitor. Seeing that monitor we aligned the ITM and we obtained the reclection from the ITM at the end table.

* We also tried to match the mode by moving a lens with f=400mm, but we couldn't obtain a good spot size.