Okay, I have finished modifying the Xend QPD whitening board, although I will likely need to change the gain on Monday.

Rather than following my plan in elog 10782, I removed the AD602's entirely, and just use the AD620's as the amplifiers.  We don't need remotely adjustable gains, and the AD620s are a less noisy part.

I set the gain to be 30dB using a 1.65k resistor for R_G, which turns out to be too high.  After I installed the board and realized that my counts were much higher than they used to be, I realized that what we had been calling +30dB was in fact +13.2dB. ( I am assuming that the ADC for the gain sliders were putting out a maximum of +10V.  The AD620 used to have a 1/10 voltage divider at the input, and an overall gain of 1, so the output of the AD620 was 100mV.  This goes into pin 16 of the AD602, which has gain of 32*V_set + 10.  Which gives 32*0.1+10=13.2dB.  Ooops.  We've been lying to ourselves. )

Anyhow, before I made the gain realization, I was happily going along, setting the AD620s' gains all to 30dB. I also copied Koji's modification from April of this year, and permanently enabled the whitening filters.

Here is the schematic of what ended up happening.  The red modifications were already in place, and the greens are what I did today.

You can see the "before" picture in my elog Wednesday, elog 10774.  Here is an "after" photo:

Here is a spectrum comparing the dark noise of the Xend QPD after modification to the current Yend QPD (which is still using the AD602 as the main instrumentation amplifier).  I have given the Yend data an extra 16.8dB to make things match.

And, here is a set of spectra comparing both ends, dark noise versus single arm lock.  While I'll have to sacrifice a lot of it, there's oodles more SNR in the Xend now.  The Yend data still has the "gain fixing" extra 16.8dB.

The Xend quadrant input counts (before the de-whitening filters) now go up to peak values of about 1,000 at single arm lock.  If (optimistically) the we got full power recycling and the arms got to powers of 300, that would mean we would have 300,000 counts, which is obviously way more than we actually have ADC range for.  Currently, the Yend quadrant input counts go as high as 50, which with arm powers of 300 would give 15,000 counts.  I think I need to bring the Xend gain down to about the level of the Yend, so that we don't saturate at full arm powers.  I can't remember right now - are the ends 14-bit or 16-bit ADCs?  If they're 16-bit, then I can set the gain somewhere between the current X and Y values.

 Finally, I added a section of the 40m's DCC document tree for the QPD whitening:  E1400473, with a page for each end.  Xend = D1400414, Yend = D1400415.

 16 bit. There aren't any 14-bit ADCs anywhere in LIGO. The aLIGO suspensions have 18-bit DACs.

The Y-End gains seem reasonable to me. I think that we only use TRX/Y as error signals once we have arm powers of >5 so we should consider if the SNR is good enough at that point; i.e. what would be the actual arm motion if we are limited only by the dark noise?

I seem to remember that the estimate for the ultimate arm power is ~200, considering that we have such high losses in the arms.

In April, Koji logged that he had made some changes to the Yend QPD whitening board (elog 9854).  Today, I pulled the Xend board to see if it had the same modifications.  The filter shapes all seem to be the same (as in, the capacitors at the output filters were removed, etc.), and the final gain is the same.  I just realized that I didn't explicitly check if the whitening switches were pulled to ground to permanently turn on the whitenening, but hopefully I'll be able to see that in the photo. 

I have not made any changes today (yet) to the board, so the overall gain is still accessible via EPICS.  I wanted to do a quick check that we won't be saturating things at full power with the maximum gain, before I make a change.

EDIT:  After comparing the photos here and in elog 9854, the X end board has the filter shape modifications that were done some time ago, but the whitening is not permanently enabled.  For the Yend board, Koji added a jumper wire connecting (for example) R97 and R106 to the grounded side of C69.  This jumper wire is not in place on the X qpd board.

Before I re-pull the board and modify it, I want to make sure I know what I'm going to do for the gain slider override.

Here is a little PDF of what I plan to do to both of the transmission QPD whitening boards later today.  The idea is to take away the remote gain slider inputs, and force the gains to always be at +30dB.

The red and blue notes are from Koji's elog 9854, and the green are my plans for today. 

I will cut the traces from the gain slider inputs, and pull the negative input of the AD620 to ground.  The positive input will be connected to the +5 voltage line, with a divider so that the positive input to the AD620 is about 666mV. 

The AD602 will be maxed out at +30dB with anything over 625mV. 

Unless there are objections, I will start these modifications in an hour or so.  I will also make the Xarm whitening always-on, just like Koji has already done for the Yend.

EDIT, JCD, 12Dec2014:  These are not the modifications that were made.  Please see ____ for actual modifications.

I went down to the Xend table to look at it to understand Steve's proposal, and I noticed that the doubling crystal's heater's cable is mushed between the table's edge and the black table cover wall.  This made me sad, so I disabled the heater, turned it off, then unplugged the cable from the back of the controller.  I tried to re-route the cable through the hole in the black table cover wall, but going that way the cable is ~1 foot too short.  So I put it back the way it was, but used a totally hacky solution to prevent the cable from being mushed.  I put a dog clamp right at the edge of the table so it is pushing on the table cover wall a little bit, to give the cable space to get out.  This is very mickey mouse, and kind of lame.  But we either need to make a cable extension, or somehow get the heater controller to sit much, much higher under the table.

I plugged the heater controller back in, and turned it back on to the same setpoint that it was at (I think 37.5C).  It's probably warm by now, but when I turned it back on, the heater's actual temp was 33C.

[Rana Koji]

This is an elog about the activity on Friday night.

- The X arm green beam was aligned with assist of the ASX system.

- M1 PZT alignment was swept while M2 PZT was under the control of ASX.

- Everytime M1 was touched, M2 was restored by manual alignment so that the REFL beam hits the center of the REFL PD.
  This way we could recover the lock of TEM00. Once TEM00 is recovered, ASX took care of the alignment of M2

- The error signal used by the cavity dither did not give us a good indication where the optimal alignment is.

- Thus the best alignment of M1 had to be manually scanned. The resulting maximum green transmission was ~0.88

- Once the beam was aligned, the out-of-loop stability of the Xarm was measured.
  There has been no indication of the improvement compared to Manasa's measurement taken before our beam alignment.

ASX scripts for PZT dither have been fixed appropriately. Script resides in scripts/ASX.

You can run the scripts from the ASX medm screen now.

 Shutter moved, no more clipping.

Pick-off mirror 2" replaced by 1" one. Laseroptik HR 532nm, incident angle 30-45 degrees, AR 532 nm

Green REFL PD moved to 4" close to pick-off mirror. Pd being close to pick-off does not separate multiple reflections on it. I'll replace Laseroptic mirror with Al one. It is not easy to find.

 Hole cut into side wall for doubler oven cable to exit.

- An Aluminum mirror instead of 2" unknown mirror for the pick-off for the rejected beam from the green faraday isolator (Steve)
=> Replaced. To be reviewed

- Faraday mount replacement. Check what we have for the replacement. (Steve)

- The green REFL PD should be closer to the pick-off mirror. (Steve)
=> Moved. To be reviewed

- A beam dump should be placed for the green REFL PD

- Move the green shutter to the place where the spot is small (Steve)
=> Moved. To be reviewed.

- The pole of the PZT mounting should be replaced with a reasonable one. (Steve with Manasa's supervision)

- Tidying up doubling oven cable. Make a hole on the wall. (Steve)
=> Done. To be reviewed.

- Tidying up the PZT cabling (Steve)

- The optics are dirty. To be drag wiped. (Manasa, Masayuki)

 Beam trap for Pd refl is in place. Cabeling is ti·died up.

 Laseroptic 1" mirror is replaced by Al 1" mirror. Problem remains the same. This diffraction patter has to be coming from the Faraday.

  Atm1, good separation when Pd is far 

  Atm2, bad separation when Pd is close 

 The extra high post 3.375"  for PZT is ready. We also have 2 more 2" green Laseroptik mirrors. I'm ready to swap them in.

The  75 mm  focal length  lens  was placed in front of the green REFL PD yesterday.

Working in Xend with mask on has become unbearable. It is very hot there and I would really like if we fix this issue.

Today, the Xend Green laser was just unable to hold lock for longer than 10's of seconds. The longest I could see it hold lock was for about 2 minutes. I couldn't find anything obviously wrong with it. Attached are noise spectrums of error and control points. The control point spectrum shows good matching with typical free running laser noise.

Are the few peaks above 10 kHz in error point spectrum worrysome? I need to think more about it in a cooler place to make sure.

I wanted to take a high frequency spectrum of error point to make sure that higher harmonics of 250 kHz modulation frequency are not leaking into the PDH box after demodulation. However, the lock could not be maintained long enough to take this final measurement. I'll try again tomorrow morning. It is generally cooler in the mornings.

This post is just an update on what's happening. I need to work more to get some meaningful inferences about this loop.

The Xgreen PD now has a cable going over to the beatbox. Once beatbox characterization is done I can re-find the beat, and we can do some stuff with the beatbox.

[Yuta, Koji, Jenne]

Lots of small things happened tonight, in preparation for having both arms' ALS working simultaneously.

1. Xarm aligned in IR

     1.1 ETMX oplev centered

2. Xgreen coarsely aligned to Xarm

3. X beat setup on PSL table resurrected. 

     3.1 Steering optics for both X and Y green (before PBS) were touched to fix clipping Xgreen on some of the first mirrors after the light exits the chambers.

     3.2 Xgreen aligned to beat PD

     3.3 PSL green waveplate rotated so ~half of the light goes to X beat, other ~half goes to Y beat (recall we had rotated the polarization so we had max light on the Y beat PD a few weeks ago).

          3.3.1 Now we have ~80uW of PSL green going to each beat PD.

     3.4 PSL green aligned to X beat PD

          3.4.1 Replaced mount for mirror between PBS (which splits PSL green light) and BS (which combines PSL green and X green) so that I could get the alignment correct without having to use the full range of the knobs on the mount.

     3.5 Realigned (coarsely) Ygreen to Y beat PD - the mirrors just after the chambers had been touched, so Y green was no longer directly on the PD.  This will need to be done more finely when we're ready to lock the Yarm again.

     3.6 Dedicated cables for the DC of each beat PD were put in place, so we have those in addition to the DC transmission PDs which we are putting in temporarily each time we align the green to the cavities.  Some mystery unused cables that were running under the PSL table were removed.  The power for the X beat PD was rerouted so that it's much closer to the actual diode, and out of the way. 

4. Better alignment of X green to X arm.

     4.1 Put Green Transmission camera into place

     4.2 Noticed that the X green spot on the transmission camera is not nearly as steady as the Y green.  Increased the gain of the X green refl PD on the end table to see if it helped the spot be more steady, but it's still very wiggly.  We reverted the gain to what it was.  We need to fix this!!!!

    4.3 Removed camera, looked at X transmission DC (PD is temporarily in front of the beat PD), tried to increase the transmission.

     4.4 Aligning the green to the X arm has been really tough - there were a few more iterations of camera then DC PD.

     4.5 Measured X green power on the PSL table - 02 mode was ~150uW.  The 00 mode is still not very stable, which is frustrating, although we have a reasonable amount of power transmitted.   

     4.6 The X end green shutter was moved out of the beam path since the green beam was clipping while going through the shutter.  We need to put it back now that the beam is pretty much aligned.  The beam size and the aperture are roughly the same, so we should look to see if there is a different place on the table where the beam is a little smaller, where we can put the shutter.

5. Whitening filters (Pomona box-style) made for the Xarm I and Q channels - these are the same as the whitening for the Y arm.

6. 30m SMA cable made to be used for 2nd delay line.

     6.1 Steve reminded me this morning that we returned one of the fancy spools of cable that was purchased for the delay lines, since it was defective.  We didn't get it replaced because there was debate as to what is the best kind of cable to use.  We need to come to a conclusion, but for now we have a regular RG-405 cable.

7.  Jamie has started work on modifying the beatbox so that we can have 2-arm ALS.  Hopefully that will be done soon-ish, because we're otherwise pretty close to being ready.

[Jenne, Jamie]

We took a look at the Xend green, and we weren't able to make it lock.  We improved the alignment a little bit, and when we looked at the error signal, it looked nice and PDH-y, but for whatever reason, the cavity won't catch lock.

While aligning the green to the arm, Jamie noticed that the reflection from the intracavity power (not the prompt reflection) was not overlapping with the input beam or prompt reflection.  This means that the cavity axis and the input green beam were not co-linear.  I adjusted the BS and ITMX to get the IR transmitted beam (which had been near clipping on the top edge of the first (2 inch) optic it sees out of the vacuum) back near the input green beam spot on the combining beam splitter.  Then we continued tweaking the green alignment until we saw nice TEM00 flashes in the cavity.  The SNR of the error signal increased significantly after this work, since the cavity buildup was much higher.  But alas, still no lock. 

 I tweaked the alignment of ITMX and ETMX a teeny bit to get the TEM00 flashes back (the work in the previous elog was pre-dinner, so it had been a few hours), then took a screenshot of the error signal and refl dc power on the photodiode for the green xend setup.

The error signal is certainly noisy, although I think when Jamie and I were looking at it earlier this evening, the SNR was a little better.

I need to look at the modulation depth, to see if it's correct, ... maybe lock the Xarm on IR and scan the green laser PZT to check the sideband heights.

I should also check to make sure that the PD is powered, and the gain is high enough (currently the PD gain is set to 20dB).  Earlier today, when I set the gain to 30dB, Jamie said that it was saturating, so I put it back down to the 20dB where we found it.

Still no lock of the green though :(

Edit: realized I was bad and didn't label the traces on the plot:  green is refl dc power, blue is demodulated error signal.

The Y end aux laser light leaking after the doubling crystal has been coupled into the 70m long PM fiber. 

Input power = 250mW;  Output after 70m = 20mW

The poor efficiency is partially due to the ellipticity of the beam itself and partially due to the compromise I had to make using a single lens to couple the light into the fiber (given the limitations in space). But 20mW should be more than sufficient for a beat note setup.

Light propagates as follows after the doubling crystal:

Doubler ---> Harmonic Separator (45deg) ---> Lens (f=12.5cm) --> Steering mirror (Y1) --> Fiber collimator ( Thor labs CFC-2X-C) --> FIber end

I will update photos of the setup shortly.

I have left the 70m fiber in its spool sitting at the Y end and blocked the light before the last Y1 steering mirror in the above setup. So it should be safe.

Other:

Through the course of the work, I disabled the ETMY oplev and enabled it before closing the enclosure. I also reduced the AUX laser power and brought it back up after the work.
I did a check to see if the arms are locking in both IR and green and they did.
 

 10% seems like a pretty bad coupling efficiency, even for a single lens. I know that the NPRO itself isn't so elliptical as that. Where is the other 230 mW going? random scattering?

Given that this is such an invasive process and, since its so painful to lose a whole night of locking due to end table business, I suggest that you always measure the out-of-loop ALS noise at the end of the end table work. Just checking that the green laser is locked to the arm is not sufficient to prove that the end table work won't prevent us from locking the interferometer.

We should insist on this anytime someone works on the optics or electronics at EX or EY. Don't have enough time to do an out-of-loop ALS spectrum? Then don't work at the end tables at all that day. We've got PZT alignment and mode matching work to do, as well as the rebuild of the EX table enclosure, so this is a good discipline to pick up now.

I used the above configuration and was able to obtain ~52% coupling.

Input power = 250mW
Output power with absorptive ND 1.0 = 13 mW

I used the absorptive ND filter before the lens to keep the coupled output power within the range of fiber power meter and also avoid scattering of enormous amount of uncoupled light all over the table.

I have attached the screenshot of the out of loop ALS noise before opening the table (BLUE) and after closing down (MAGENTA). The beat note frequency and amplitude before and after were (14.4MHz/-9.3dBm) and (20.9MHz/-10 dBm).

Since I obtained a poor coupling efficiency from the earlier setup, I went back to calculate the coupling efficiency of the current setup.

For the current setup, I took the average of the x and y waist of the input beam and calculated the distance at which the input beam diameter would match the (fiber +collimator) beam diameter.

Average waist = 40.2um @-3.3mm from face of doubling crystal

(Fiber PM980 + Collimator f=2.0mm) beam waist = 205um

Distance(z) at which the input beam waist is 205um = 11.9cm

The closest available lens was f = 12.5cm. So I used it to couple the input beam by placing it at z ~12.5cm on a micrometer stage.

Since this gave only 10% coupling, I went back to calculate (using 'a la mode') the best possible coupling that can be obtained taking into consideration the ellipticity of the beam.

The maximum obtainable coupling (mode overlap) is 14.5%  which is still poor.

Redesign

Taking into account the ellipticity of the input beam, the available lenses and the space restrictions (lens can be placed only between z= 8 to 28cm), I calculated the best possible coupling efficiency (using 'a la mode').

The maximum possible mode overlap that can be obtained is 58.6% (matlab code and plot attached)

>>auxmode

modematching = 0.58632 

Optimized Path Component List:

    label    z (m)     type    parameters         

    -----    -----     ----    ----------         

    L1       0.0923    lens    focalLength: 0.0750

As for the X Arm, this the transfer function I measured for the Y arm cavity.

This time I'm using a different photodiode than the PDA255 on the Y end table.

The diode I'm using is the PDA520 from where TRY comes from.

I'm going to repeat the measurement with PDA255.

 Measurement repeated with the PDA255 PD at the end but not big changes

 I was getting the Y Arm ready for Eric Q's loss measurements and so I looked at the noise and loop shape. The loop shape was strange:

You can see that the gain margin is too low at high frequencies. That's why we have >15 dB of gain peaking. Way too much! I think this is from Masayuki and Manasa increasing the phase margin at some point in the past. I lowered the gain by 3 dB from 0.1 to 0.07 and now the awful gain peaking is less. But what about the low frequency gain? Is there enough?

I calibrated the OUT channel with 14 nm/count (1/f^2) with a Q = 10 pole pair at 1 Hz. The error signal is done to cross over at 180 Hz. It looks like the resonant gain at 25 Hz is a little too much and the in-loop RMS is 10 pm. Jenne says the linewidth is ~1 nm, so this seems sort of OK. Except that the LIGO-I DARM RMS had to be <0.1 pm for ~the same linewidth. Do we need to do better before trying to bring the arms into resonance?

I've remove FM1 and FM8. I put the RollRG of FM8 into the BounceRG and renamed it BounceRoll. Also changed the Y-arm restore so that RollRG and the 5,5:0,0 are no longer triggered automatically since the double integrator was overkill and we already have a 1:0 in FM2. I also lowered the peak gain for the roll mode RG from 30 to 10 dB because it was also overkill. We've gained a few more degrees at the UGF.

Yesterday and today I was in the lab doing many cavity scan.

First I did many measurement with the cavity aligned in order to get the position of the 00 modes, then I misaligned the beam in many different ways to enhance the higher order modes.

In particular, I first misaligned the mode cleaner to make the beam clipping into the Faraday. To do this, I set to 0 the WFS gain, but I left the autolocker still enabled. In this way, the autolocker couldn't bring the mirrors back to the aligned position.

Then I misaligned also the TT2 to get even more HOMs.

Eventually, Rana came and we misaligned TT1 to clip the beam, and using TT2 we aligned back the beam to the arm.

To increase the SNR, we changed the gain of the TRY PD, setting it to 20dB (which corresponds to a factor 100 in digital scale)

I attached one scan that I did with Rana on Sunday night. I could not upload a better resolution image because the file size was too big, but here's the path to find all of the scans:

../users/annalisa/sweep/Yarm

There are many folders, one per each day I measured. In each folder there are measurements relative to aligned cavity, Pitch and Yaw misalignment.

 RXA EDIT:

The PDA520 used for TRY was set to 0 dB analog gain. This corresponds to ~500 counts out of 32768. The change to 20 dB actually increases the gain by 100. This makes the single arm lock saturate at ~25000 counts (obviously in analog before the ADC). The right setting for our usual running is probably 10 dB.

For the IMC WFS, we had disabled the turn on in the autolocker to use the IMC to steer the beam in the FI, but that was a flop (not enough range, not enough lever arm). In the end, I think we didn't get any clipping.

I lined up the Y Arm for locking and then centered the oplevs for ETMY and ITMY.

* The ITMY OL has still got the old style laser. Steve, pleaes swap this one for a HeNe. Also the optical layout seems strange: there are two copies of the laser beam going into the chamber (??). Also, the QPD transimpedance needs to be increase by a factor of ~10. We're only getting ~500 counts per quadrant. Its worth it for someone to re-examine the whole ITMY OL beam layout.

* The ETMY OL beam was coming out but clipping on the mount for the ETMY OL HeNe. This indicates a failure on our part to do the ETMY closeout alignment properly. In fact, I get the feeling from looking around that we overlooked aligning the OL and IPPOS/ANG beams this time. If we're unlucky this could cause us to vent again. I undid part of the laser mount and changed the height on the receiving mirror to get the beam back onto the QPD.

I noticed that there is significant green light now getting into some of the IR PDs; beacuse of this there are weird offsets in the TRY QPD and perhaps elsewhere. We had better purchase some filters to tape over the front of the sensitive IR sensors to prevent the couplling from the green laser.

* There is a beam on IPPOS, but its too big for the detector (this has always been the case). We need to put a 2" lens with a weak focusing power on this path so as to halve the beam size on the detector. Right now its clipping and misleading. There is also a 0.9V offset on the SUM signal. I'm not sure if this readout is working at all.

* I couldn't find any beam on IPANG at all. Not sure what's changed since Kiwamu saw it.

 The 2nd beam from this laser is for the SRM's OpLev, so that shouldn't be changed.

For better or worse, we didn't do anything to the ETM OpLevs, because they don't have any in-vac steering optics.  We did however go through and check on all the corner OpLevs.

I went to the Y end. The AUX laser was on Standby. I pushed the Standby button. The laser turned on and there was some green light. However, the controller displayed the message "CABLE?" which according to the manual means that the laser head is powered but there is no control over the laser (e.g. the control cable is disconnected). I turned off the controller and disconnected both the power and control cables. I put them back and turned the controller back on.

I pushed the Standby button, the laser turned on and this time the controller displayed the laserhead's state. I was able to change the current/temperature. The problem seems to be resolved.

The first Faraday isolater rejected beam path from the NPRO is fixed.

I borrowed the GTRY BBPD  for the REFL165 trial before.

Now the PD is back on the PSL table.

The PD is intentionally misaligned so that anyone can find it is not aligned.

I did a calibration measurement for the Y part of the BeatBox using a Marconi. This is in order to get a more accurate calibration for the arm cavity scan measurement.

The calibration factor I found is:

C1:ALS-BEATX_FINE_PHASE_OUT   50.801 +/- 0.009 deg/MHz

Procedure

During my cavity scan measurement, I had recorded the beat frequency and amplitude from the Spectrum Analyzer at each zero crossing.

I connected the Marconi to the RF in of the Y part of the BeatBox, and I set the Marconi carrier frequency at one of this zero-crossing frequency that I had recorded, while I set the amplitude in way to have on the spectrum analyzer the same beat amplitude that I read during the measurements or, equivalently, in order to have C1:ALS_BEATY_FINE_Q of the order of 1200 (which is the same value I had during my measurements).

I started with

• Carrier frequency = 80.2 MHz
• Amplitude = -3dBm

Then I monitored the C1:ALS_BEATY_FINE_I on the oscilloscope and I adjusted the carrier frequency so that I had zero signal on the oscilloscope. Eventually the frequency corresponding to the zero crossing was 79.989 MHz.

I resetted the phase (clear history in the BEATY_FINE_PHASE panel) and I started changing the frequency by steps of 0.2 MHz, and I spanned about 70 MHz (from 32 to 102 MHz).

Resutls

The calibration coefficient I found is not so different from the one that Yuta measured (elog 8199).

Here are the fit parameters:

y = a + bx

a = -4239.7 +/- 0.6 deg

b = 50.801 +/- 0.009 deg/MHz

I tried the "Yarm + PRMI" configuration to see what happens.
The Y arm was locked at a resonance and held with the ALS technique.
On the other hand, the X arm was freely swinging.

I briefly tried severl demod signals to calm down the central part, but didn't succeed.
Now I feel I really want to have the X arm locked with the ALS technique too.
Give me the beat-box !

The attached screen shot shows the transmitted light of both arms as a function of time.
TRY is always above 1, since it was kept at a resonance.
Sometimes TRY went to 50 or so.

I calculated how the DC signals should look like in the Y arm PRMI configuration.

The expected signals are overlaid in the same plot as that of shown in #6313.

You can see there are disagreements between the observed and expected signals in the plot below at around the time when the arm is brought to the resonance.

(expected behaviors)

•  TRY: At the end it should be at 1 (remember TRY is normarlized) and should not go more than that, since the power-recycling is in a weird situation and it is not fully recycling the power.
•  ASDC: It should become brighter at the end because the arm cavity flips the sign of the reflected light and hence the dark port must be on a bright fringe.
•  REFLDC: It will decrease a little bit because the arm cavity and MICH try to suck some amount of the power into the interferometer.

I tried the Yarm + PRMI configuration again.

The PRMI part was locked, but it didn't stay locked during the Y arm was brought to the resonance point.

I will post the time series data later.

(locking of the PRMI part)

Tonight I was able lock the PRMI when the arm was off from the resonance by 10 nm (#6306).

This time I used REFL11Q to lock the MICH instead of the usual AS55Q because the MICH didn't stay locked with AS55Q for some reason.

The PRCL was held by REFL33I as usual.

Also I disabled the power normalization for the error signals because it could do something bad during the Y arm is borough to the resonance.

In order to reduce the number of the glitches, PRM was slightly misaligned because I knew that the lower finesse gives fewer glitches.

The figure below shows the time series of the Y arm + PRMI trail.

(Top plot )

  Normalized TRY (intracavity power). It is normalized such that it shows 1 when the arm is locked with the recycling mirrors misaligned.

(Middle plot)

ASDC and REFLDC in arbitrary unit.

(Bottom plot)

The amount of the arm length detuning observed at the fine frequency discriminator.

(Sequence)

At t = 20 sec, the amount of detuning was adjusted so that the cavity power goes to the maximum. At this point the PRM was misaligned.

At t = 30 sec, the cavity length started being slowly detuned to 10 nm. As it is being detuned the intracavity power goes down to almost zero.

At t = 45 sec, the alignment of PRM was restored. Because of that, the REFLDC and ASDC diodes started receiving a large amount of light.

At t = 85 sec, the PRCL and MICH were locked. The REFLDC signal became a high value as the carrier light is mostly reflected. The ASDC goes to a low value as the MICH is kept in the dark condition.

At t = 100 sec, the length started being slowly back to the resonance while the PRMI lock was maintained.

At t = 150 sec, the lock of the PRCL and MICH were destroyed. With the arm fully resonance, I wasn't able to recover the PRMI lock with the same demod signals.

 Isn't the point that the 11 and 55 MHz signals have the carrier effect, but the 3f signals are better?

Last night I tried the "Y arm + central part" locking again. Three different configuration were investigated :

•  Y arm + DRMI
•  Y arm + PRMI
•  Y arm + MICH

In all the configurations I displaced the Y arm by 20 nm from the resonance.

As for the DRMI and PRMI configurations I wasn't able to acquire the locks.

As for the MICH configuration, the MICH could be locked with AS55. But after bringing the Y arm to the resonance point the lock of MICH was destroyed.

With the newly amplified POY signal, locking the mode cleaner to the Y arm at ~30kHz bandwidth was quite straightforward. The offset jumps still happen, and are visible in POY11_I_ERR, but are never big enough to cause much power degradation in TRY (except when turning on CM board boosts, but its still not enough to lose lock). The script which accomplishes this is at scripts/YARM, and is in the svn. The MC2/AO crossover is at about 150Hz with 40deg margin.

For now, I'm using IN1 of the CM board, because I haven't removed the op27s that I put into IN2's gain stages. I believe the slew rate limitations of these prevent them from working completely during the offset jumps. I'll put AD829s back soon. 

At first, I had ITMX misalgined to use AS55 as an out of loop sensor, then I aligned and locked the X arm on POX to compare.

Weirdly enough, locking the mode cleaner to the Y arm with 30kHz UGF and two boosts on make no real visible difference in the X arm control signal. This is strange, as the whole point of this affair was to remove the presumably large influence of frequency noise on the X arm signals... Maybe this is injecting too much POY sensor noise?

Below 100 Hz, I suppose this means that the X arm is now limited by the quadrature sum of the X and Y arm seismic noise.

The noise budget on the Y arm ALS has begun.

Right now the fluctuation of the green beat-note seems mostly covered by unknown noise which is relatively white.

(Though I feel I made a wrong calibration ... I have to check it again)

(Measurement condition)

Scripting of the single arm automated lock script is 80% done.

The remaining 20 % is not something immediately needed and I start decreasing the priority on the Y arm ALS.

(Remaining stuff)

• Automated optimization of I/Q phases at the frequency discriminator's signal.
  • this part will be done after we install Jamie's new beat box
• A routine function which checks if the beat note is within a reasonable bandwidth
  • This part can be done with the frequency-divided signal and the digital delay line frequency discriminator
  • Another approach is to install a frequency counter, which doesn't have to be so precise
• A state bit which tells us how far the script goes
• An exit handler.
  • This should run whenever the script is unexpectedly force-quite, to gently bring the ALS system down.
• A servo which brings the beat frequency to exactly a point where the infrared light is on a resonance point
  • Currently this part is partially human-aided. I put a little bit of correction in the frequency offset by looking at time series
  • To automate this part, we need another LOCKIN system to shake the arm length and demodulates the transmitted light

Locking activity last night :

  The free run beat-note in 532 nm has been measured.

However I couldn't close the ALS loop somehow.

Every time I tried closing the loop it broke the Y end PDH lock in a couple of minutes.

 (Things to be done)

   1.  Optimization of the Y end PDH servo loop

   2. Refinement of the broadband RFPD setup

Here is a new time series plot showing how stably ALS can control the arm length.

In the middle of the plot the cavity length was held at the resonance point for ~ 2 min. and then it passed through the resonance point to show the full shape of the PDH signal.

Apparently the PDH signal is now quieter than before (#6133)

                        One of my goals this week is to get people to make plots with physical units:

That ALS plot would be 5x cooler if the POY11 signal could be in meters instead of counts or cubits.

Here are the latest plots that I have obtained from the Friday night:

    Time Series   

The residual motion in the arm displacements reached 70 pm in rms.

 Locking activity last night:

  It became able to close the ALS loop (beat-note signal was fed back to ETMY).

The UGF was about 60 Hz, but somehow I couldn't bring the UGF higher than that.

Every time when I increased the UGF more than 60 Hz, the Y end PDH was unlocked (or maybe ETMY became crazy at first).

Perhaps it could be a too much noise injection above 60 Hz, since I was using the coarse frequency discriminator.

Anyway I will try a cavity sweep and the successive noise budgeting while holding the arm length by the beat-note signal.

Another thing : I need a temperature feedback in the Y end green PDH loop, so that the PZT voltage will be offloaded to the laser temperature.

Handing off the servo from ALS to LSC for one arm is quite easy because servo filters are pretty much same for ALS and LSC. I demonstrated it Y arm during MI is locked.
We need DARM/CARM-kind of handing off in the near future.

What I did:
  1. Brought both arms to IR resonance.
  2. Brought X arm to off resonance.
  3. Locked MI in bright fringe(why can't I lock in dark fringe, when one arm is on resonance?) using AS55_Q and BS.
  4. Ran /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/ALS/handofftoLSC.py Yarm to handoff. It decreases ALS gain and increases LSC gain in 30 sec ramp time. It also turns on some filters for LSC. Make sure you turn off filter triggers for LSC.

 Below is the plot of what I did. You can see LSC feedback signal gradually increasing and TRY getting more stable.
 I was dissapointed with ALS not having any DQ channels for feedback signal. I will make them DQ channels tomorrow.

One of my goals in this week is : measurement of the current best ALS noise budget.

Last night I took a new noise spectra of the Y arm ALS, which is shown in the attached figure below.

The displacement of the arm cavity observed from the IR PDH is at 66 pm in rms. In the measurement the arm length was stabilized with the ALS technique.

I did some more stuff for the Y arm ALS and updated the noise budget:

After the works, the rms displacement improved a little bit, so it is now at 24 pm in rms.

Though, it turned out that the MFD's ADC is now limiting the noise in a frequency band of 200 mHz - 5 Hz.

So tonight I will increase the gain of the whitening filter to push down the ADC noise more.

(What I did)

 + added the DAC noise and comparator noise based on measurements.

 + redesigned the servo filter shape to suppress the seismic noise below 10 Hz.

 The attached plot below shows the newly designed open loop transfer function together with the old one for a comparison.

UGF is at 120 Hz and the phase margin is about 27 deg.

• FM7 = resonant gain (17)
• FM6 = resonant gain (3)
• FM5 = zero(1) * pole(500)
• FM4 = pole(1) * zero(40.) * 40.
• FM3 = pole(1) * zero(40.) * 40.
• FM2 = pole(0.001)*zero(1)*1000.

Surprisingly increasing the gain of the whitening filter didn't improve the noise curve.

It suggests that the ADC noise is not the limiting factor below 10 Hz.