--Apologies for the late post--

I was at the PSL table taking an inventory of the components for a while after Koji, Steve, and Kiwamu were there. I set the HEPAs back to 20% when I left (assuming that they were turned up when the compartment was opened).

You can remove the RFAM measuring setup. Once we upgrade, we will no longer have a MZ or the related problems.

I am at the PSL table taking what is hopefully the last set of pictures for the diagram. Woohoo.

 I'm out, HEPAs are back at 20%.

I'm at the PSL table taking inventory of the elements I don't have down yet.

 OK, I'm out--hopefully for good. HEPAs back at 20%.

The laser power is down 5-6%

I adjusted the steerings to the PMC and gained 7%. Now the MC_TRANS 7.0 has been recovered.

Actually I need another 7% to get MC_TRANS 7.5.
But I couldn't find how I can recover 126MOPA-AMPMON to 2.8ish.

A 30-day trend of the PCDRIVE from the FSS.

The PMC power is seems to be on the rise, ( MOPA_AMPMON is dropping ?) but I do not think it is real. We have Santa Anna wind condition, when the relative humidity drops and  ......

There is an other funky think. The room temp became rock solid. The PSL HEPAs running at 20% and IFO-room ACs are also in normal operational mode.

13:00 Found MC TRANS less than 7.
13:50 Go into the PSL table.
14:20 Work done. Now I am running SLOWscan script.
15:10 SLOWscan finished. It was not satisfactory. I go into the table again.
15:15 Running SLOWscan again.
16:00 SLOWscan done. Lock PMC. Adjust NPRO current so as to maximize PMC TRANS.
16:10 Lock RC, PMC, MZ, MC. Align PMC / MZ on the table. Align MC WFS beams on the QPDs.
16:30 Work done.

New FSS-SLOWDC nominal is -4.0

Now MC TRANS is 7.9. This is +12% increase. ENJOY!
HEPA is on at 90%. Light is off.

---------

NPRO TEMP trimmer adjustment
o PSL NPRO TEMP trimmer at the back of the laser head was turned 6.5 times in CW.
o It reduced NPRO crystal temp by 9.5deg. (43.5deg -> 34.0deg for FSS_SLOWDC -5.5)

To revert the previous setting, refer to the former measurement
c.f. http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/2008

NPRO Thermal scan
o 2 scans are performed.
o I selected the colder side of the second scan. i.e. SLOWDC=-4.0

NPRO Current adjustment
o Tweaked C1:PSL-126MOPA_126CURADJ while looking at PMC TRANS.
o CURADJ was changed from -2.25 to -1.9. This corresponds to change of C1:PSL-126MOPA_CURMON from 2.503A to 2.547A.

Here is the plots for the powers. MC TRANS is still rising.

What I noticed was that C1:PSL-FSS_PCDRIVE nolonger hit the yellow alert.
The mean reduced from 0.4 to 0.3. This is good, at least for now.

Zach found the HEPA switch on the PSL table OFF.  He turned them on.

I removed the multiply resonant EOM that has been set by a SURF student from PSL table.

I will use it for checking the resonant circuit.

This morning, after Steve pointed out that the readout RFAMPD_DC was zero, I thought of realigning the beam on the photodiode. Maybe I touched the lens or the beam splitter that send the beam on the diode when I installed an other beam splitter to make the measurement of the calibration between two ThorLabs PDA255 photodiodes.

After aligning the beam on the RFAMPD, the voltage of the DC readout was lower than it used to be (C1:IOO-RFAMPD_DC ~ 0.4 now vs. 4 as it was on November 4th).

I maximized the DC readout but the problem seems to be that the beam spot is not a round TEM00. In particular the spot looks like that of a TEM10 mode.

Since we're looking at the MC transmitted beam, is it possible that the MC is locked on the wrong mode?

Check out the attached picture.

This morning I found a frequency generator connected to something on the PSL table sitting on the blue step next to the sliding doors.

Is anyone using it? Has it been forgotten there? If that's the case, can the interested person please take care of removing it?

Last night there was an activity for a calibratuon work, which I helped. I can take care of the FG.

On Rana's suggestion I checked the MC transmission QPD (C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_SUM). I found that the readout is almost zero when the MC is unlocked.

I unlocked the Mode Cleaner turning off the LSC control and disabling the autolocker. The QPD reads 0.014. It seems that there is no offset.

I also checked with the IR card around the photodetector and I didn't see any stray beam.

OK. I have been keeping my eyes on the MC transmission. In deed, the MC trans has been well kept at around 7.7 since the last PSL work.
Even it was over the 8 today!

PC_DRIVE is also improving after the last PSL work!

This plot shows the RIN as measured by the ISS. Its ~2 x 10^-7, whereas its supposed to be more like 3 x 10^-8.

The ISS has DC coupled RIN channels (with a _F suffix) and AC coupled RIN channels (with a _FW suffix). By using a swept sine, Rob determined that the AC coupled channels have an AC coupling pole at ~80 Hz. The attached plot uses this and then has the overall gain adjusted to match with the _F channels below 10 Hz.

The _F channels can be converted directly into RIN by just dividing the spectra by the mean value of the time series. The dark offset of these channels is small and so this only introduces a ~5-10% calibration error.

Question #1: Why is the RIN so bad? According to the MEDM screen, the photocurrent on the MON/SENS PDs is 1.9/1.3 mA. That's sort of low, but should still allow us to get 5x10^-8 in RIN.

Question #2: Does it make an effect on the current DC Readout work? IF so, should we try to fix up the ISS in a temporary way? Since the in-loop and out-of-loop detectors are completely coherent, all of the noise is likely just unsuppressed noise from the laser. We are unable to increase the gain because of the high frequency noise from the NPRO.

Let's remember to replace this ISS with a new one that can drive an AOM. Need a volunteer to get us a new ISS.

but the increase in both the RCtrans and the RCrefl is consistent with my theory that the power going to the RC has increased ; its not just an increase in the visibility.

We should scan the AOM/VCO to make sure the frequency is matched to the resonance to within 0.5 dB.

I checked C1:PSL-FSS_VCODETPWR. The attached is the 4 months trend of the FSS RCTRANS / RFPDDC(=FSS REFL) / VCODETPWR / VCOMODLEVEL.

Although VCO modulation level setting was mostly constnt, VCODETPWR, which presumably represents the RF level, changes time by time.
It coincides with the recent reduction of the RCTRANS/RFPDDC. Actually, my touch restored the VCO to the previous more stable state.
One can see that this is not only a single occation, but it happened before too. (In the middle of Aug.)

This could be explained by the bad contact of some cable or connector.

Nevertheless we need more careful investigation:

1. Understand what VCODETPWR is exactly.
2. Investigate relationship between VCOMODLEVEL / VCODETPWR / AOM deflection efficiency / RCTRANSPD
3. Confirm the frequency matching between the VCO and AOM.

I stopped by the 40m for some reason and found that the MC trans was 7.5.
This was caused by an oscillation of FSS, which seemed to be started by itself.

The oscillation stopped by reducing the FSS total gain to +9dB (from +11dB).
This is not a permanent fix (i.e. autolocker will restore the gain).
If it seems necessary to reduce the FSS gain always, we change the MC autolocker script.

Koji, Jenne, Rob

We found that the RCPID servo "setpoint" was not in the relevant saverestore.req file, and so when c1psl got rebooted earlier this week, this setting was left at zero.  Thus, the RC got a bit chilly over the last few days.  This channel has been added. 

Also, RCPID channels have been added (manually) to conlog_channels. 

Note: The set point C1:PSL-FSS_RCPID_SETPOINT is 37.0 on C1PSL_FSS_RCPID.adl.

Now the temp is recovering with its full speed. At some point we have to restore the value of the FSS SLOW DC as the temp change drag it up.

I added 600 cc of Arrowhead Distilled Water to the chiller.

60 days plot shows that about every ~ 10 days I have to add some.

Please check the water level yourself.

[Jenne, Kiwamu]

It's been an iffy last few hours here at the 40m.  Kiwamu, Koji and I were all sitting at our desks, and the computers / RFM network decided to crash.  We brought all of the computers back, but now the RefCav and PMC don't want to lock.  I'm a wee bit confused by this.  Both Kiwamu and I have given it a shot, and we can each get the ref cav to sit and flash, but we can't catch it.  Also, when I bring the PMC slider rail to rail, we see no change in the PMC refl camera.  Since c1psl had been finicky coming back the first time, I tried soft rebooting, and then keying the crate again, but the symptoms remained the same.  Also, I tried burt restoring to several different times in the last few days, to see if that helped.  It didn't.  I did notice that MC2 was unhappy, which was a result of the burtrestores setting the MCL filters as if the cavity were locked, so I manually ran mcdown.  Also, the MC autolocker script had died, so Kiwamu brought it back to life.

Since we've spent an hour on trying to relock the PSL cavities (the descriptive word I'm going to suggest for us is persistent, not losers), we're giving up in favor of waiting for expert advice in the morning.  I suppose there's something obvious that we're missing, but we haven't found it yet......

I checked the situation from my home and the problem was solved.

The main problem was undefined state of the autolocker and the strange undefined switch states, being associated with the bootfest and burtrestore.

- MC UP/DOWN status shows it was up and down. So I ran scripts/MC/mcup and scripts/MC/mcdown. These cleared the MC autolocker status.

- I had a problem handling the FSS. After mcup/mcdown above, I randomly pushed the "enable/disable" buttons and others, and with some reason, it recovered the handling. Actually it acquired the lock autonomously. Kiwamu may have also been working on it at the same time???

- Then, I checked the PSL loop. I disconnected the loop by pushing the "test" button. The DC slider changes the PZT voltage only 0~+24V. This is totally strange and I started pushing the buttons randomly. As soon as I pushed the  "BLANK"/"NORMAL" button, the PZT output got back under the control.

- Then I locked the PMC, MZ, and MC as usual.

Alberto: You must be careful as the modulations were restored.

The low PMC transmission alarm was on this morning. The PMC alignment needs a touch up.

In order to block stray beams, I have put some beam dumps and razor blades on the PSL  table.

There were three undesired spots in total. I found two spots on the south side door of the PSL room, close to Mach-Zehnder.

Another spots was on the middle of the north door. Now they all are blocked successfully.

We are going to set the waist size to 0.1 mm for the beam going through the triple resonant EOM on a new PSL setup.

When we were drawing a new PSL diagram, we just needed to know the waist size at the EOM in order to think about mode matching.

This figure shows the relation between the waist size and the spot size at the aperture of the EOM.

The x-axis is the waist size, the y-axis is the spot size. It is clear that there is a big clearance at 0.1 mm waist size. This is good.

Also it is good because the waist size is much above the damage threshold of the EO crystal (assuming 1W input).

The attached file is the python code for making this plot.

You don't need a lengthy code for this. It is obvious that the spot size at the distance L is minimum when L =
zR, where zR is the Rayleigh range. That's all.

Then compare the spot size and the aperture size whether it is enough or not.

It is not your case, but if the damage is the matter, just escape to the large zR side. If that is not possible
because of the aperture size, your EOM is not adequate for your purpose.

Just before working on the FSS today, I noticed that the VCO RF output level was set incorrectly.

This should ALWAYS be set so as to give the maximum power in the first order diffracted sideband. One should set this by maximizing the out of lock FSS RFPD DC level to max.

The value was at 2.8 on the VCOMODLEVEL slider. In the attached plot (taken with the FSS input disabled) you can see that this puts us in the regime where the output power to the FSS is first order sensitive to the amplitude noise on the electrical signal to the AOM. This is an untenable situation.

For adjusting the power level to the FSS, we must always use the lamba/2 plate between the AOM and the RC steering mirrors. This dumps power out to the side via a PBS just before the periscope.

What is the Transfer Function of the suspension of the reference cavity? What were the design requirements? What is the Q and how well does the eddy current damping work? What did Wolfowitz know about the WMD and when? Who cooked the RTV in there and why didn't we use Viton??

To get to the bottom of these questions, today I shook the cavity and measured the response. To read out the pitch and yaw modes separately, I aligned the input beam to be misaligned to the cavity. If the beam is mis-aligned in yaw, for example, the transmitted light power becomes first order sensitive to the yaw motion of the cavity.

In the attached image (10 minute second-trend), you can see the second trends for the transmitted and relfected power. The first ringdown comes from the pitch or vertical mode. The second (shorter) one comes from the yaw misalignment and the yaw shake.

To achieve the up/down shake, I leaned onto the table and pumped it at its eigenfrequency. For the yaw shake, I put two fingers on the RC can's sweater and pushed with several pounds of force at the yaw eigenfrequency (2.6 Hz). For the vertical, I jumped up and down at half the vertical eigenfrequency (4 Hz).

I also made sure that the .SCAN field on these EPICS records were set to 9 so that there is no serious effect from a beating between the eigenfrequency and the EPICS sample rate.

Punchline:

f_vert   = 4 Hz

tau_vert = 90 seconds

Q_vert   = 1000            (yes, that number over there has 3 zeros)

f_hor    = 2.6 Hz

tau_hor  = 30 seconds

Q_hor    = 250

This is an absurd and probably makes us very sensitive to seismic noise - let's make sure to open up the can and put some real rubber in there to damp it. My guess is that these high Q modes

are just the modes of the last-stage steel spring / pendulum.

This is the error point spectrum - it is filled with huge multiples of ~75 kHz as Yoichi noticed a couple years ago.

I tried to use the netgpib.py package to read out the Agilent 4395, but the SVN had been corrupted by someone saving over the netgpib.py package. To get it to work on rosalba I reverted to the previous version, but whoever is busy hacking on netgpib.py needs to checkin the original package and work on some test code instead.

I also noticed that the default output format for the AG4395.py file is in units of Watts. This is kind of dumb - we need someone to develop this package a little as Yoichi did for the SRS785.

I measured the open loop gain of the FSS (as usual, I have multiplied the whole OLG by 10dB to account for the forward loop gain in the box). I used a source level of -20 dBm and made sure this was not saturating by changing the level.

Its clear that the BW is limited by the resonance at ~1.7 MHz. Does anyone know what that is?

I measured the RF spectrum coming out the FSS RFPD to look for saturations - its close to the hairy edge. This is with the 8x power increase from my AOM drive increase. I will increase the FSS's modulation frequency which will lower the Q and gain of the PD to compensate somewhat. The lower Q will also gain us phase margin in the FSS loooop.

I put in a bi-directional 20 dB coupler (its only rated down to 30 MHz, but its only off by ~0.3 dB at 21 MHz) between the RFPD and the FSS box. I looked at the time series on the 300 MHz scope and measured the power spectrum.

The peak signal on the scope was 40 mV; that translates to 400 mV at the RFPD output. Depending on whether the series resistor in the box is 20 or 50 Ohms, it means the MAX4107 is close to saturating.

As you can see from the spectrum, its mostly likely to hit its slew rate limit (500 V/us) first. Actually its not going to hit the limit: but even getting within a factor of 10 is bad news in terms of distortion.

Besides the multiples of the modulation frequency, you can see that most of the RMS comes from the strange large peaks at 137.9 and 181.1 MHz. Anyone know what these are from?

On the middle plot above, I have enabled the 20 MHz BW limit so you can see how much the amplitude goes down when only the 21.5 MHz SB is included. You can also see from the leftmost plot that once in awhile there is some 400mV/10ns slewing. Its within a factor of 10 of the slew rate limit.

 EO resonance in the RC path?

[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?

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

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).

In order to measure the transfer function of the RC cavity's foam, I've turned off the servo so that the room temperature noise can excite it.

The attached plot shows a step response test from 2 weeks ago. Servo is nominally still working fine.

Koji and Kevin

We unpacked the Innolight 2W laser, took an inventory, and scanned the operations manual.

[Edit by KA]

The scanned PDFs are placed on the following wiki page

http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Upgrade_09/PSL

We will measure the P-I curve, the mode profile, frequency actuator responses, and so on.

We found ref-cavity HV was off yesterday afternoon. It was turned back on.

Koji and Kevin measured the output power vs injection current for the Innolight 2W laser.

The threshold current is 0.75 A.

The following data was taken with the laser crystal temperature at 25.04ºC (dial setting: 0.12).

Koji and Kevin measured the vertical beam profile of the Innolight 2W laser at one point.

This data was taken with the laser crystal temperature at 25.04°C and the injection current at 2.092A.

The distance from the razor blade to the flat black face on the front of the laser was 13.2cm.

The data was fit to the function y(x)=a*erf(sqrt(x)*(x-x0)/w)+b with the following results.

Reduced chi squared = 14.07

x0 = (1.964 +- 0.002) mm

w  = (0.216 +- 0.004) mm

a  = (3.39  +- 0.03) V

b  = (3.46  +- 0.03) V

Back in Gainesville in 1997, I learned how to do this using the chopper wheel. We had to make the assumption that the wheel's blade was moving horizontally during the time of the chop.

One advantage is that the repetitive slices reduces the random errors by a lot - you can trigger the scope and average. Another advantage is that you can download the average scope trace using USB, floppy, or ethernet instead of pencil and paper.

But, I never analyzed it in enough detail to see if there was some kind of nasty systematic error.