Friday, we were seeing a 2 Hz harmonic series in all of the PEM channels. Today I found that some bad person had put in a 4V (!) signal into one of the channels with a signal generator. The generator was also sneakily stuck way back inside the DCU rack. NO SECRET SIGNAL INJECTIONS!

Since the ADC has a 2Vpk range, this was saturating and putting in harmonics in all the adjacent channels. I disconnected it and turned off the function generator.

 I found that several of the cables are unlabeled so I'm not sure what's plugged in. In the end, I found that the TEMP_2, _3, & _44 channels were working and so I plugged in anything that looked seismic into there.

TEMP_2 is now apparently the X channel of the 2nd Guralp. If someone can figure out which cable belongs to the Y channel, please plug it into TEMP_3 and then we can fix the channel names.

I also removed (gently) all of the accelerometers from MC2's chamber. This didn't break the lock, but I intentionally broke it to make sure it reacquired fine. It did and the MC TRANS QPD showed no significant shift afterwards.

I have added/modified SMOO settings to all of the records in psl.db appropriately. Changes checked in to SVN.

As a reminder, you should check in to the SVN all changes you make to any of the .db files or any of the .ini files in chans.

Both Guralps and the Ranger have been placed in our nice new insulated foam box, complete with packing peanuts, in the corner between the x and y arms. The Guralp breakout box has been reinstalled and everything is plugged in in prepartion for the huddle test. However, we're having some issues with ADC channels, which will be worked out tomorrow (hopefully) so that data can be collected over the weekend.

Currently, one Guralp is plugged into the three SEIS-MC1 channels. We made new channels for the second Guralp (GUR-EW, GUR-NS, and GUR-VERT), but had issues with those. So, EW and NS have been plugged into PEM_AUDIO-MIC1 and MIC2 for the time being.

The swapped in 307 convectron gauge controller  is very likely to have the  RS232 connection  wired differently from the old one.

PRP gauge has now the same error message as the PTP1:  "no comm"  I would look at RS232 wiring of the PRP gauge on the broken

controller and adapt the swapped in one to communicate. The PRP was reading 620 Torr before the swap.

The Maglev is running on single phase 220V and that voltage  was not interrupted. TP1 was running undisturbed with V1 and V4 closed.

It is independent of the UPS 120V.

We've had a devil of a time getting V1 to open, due to the Interlock code. 

The short story is that if C1:Vac-PTP1_pressure > 1.0, the interlock code won't let you push the button to open V1 (but it won't close V1). 

PTP1 is broken, so the interlock was frustrating us.   It's been broken for a while, but this hasn't bitten us till now.

We tried swapping out the controller for PTP1 with one of Bob's from the Bake lab, but it didn't work. 

It said "NO COMM" in the C1:Vac-PTP1_status, so I figured it wouldn't update if we just used tdswrite to change C1:Vac-PTP1_pressure to 0.0.  This actually worked, and V1 is now open.  This is a temporary fix.

The images that I just posted were taken with the CMOS camera.  We switched from the CCD to the CMOS because the CCD was exhibiting much higher blooming effects.  Unlike the CCD, there is a slight background structure if you look carefully in the amplitude image, but I can correct for this consistent background by taking a uniformly exposed image by placing a convex lens in front of the CMOS.  I will then divide each frame taken of the laser wavefront by the background image. 

Shown below are the plots of the amplitude and phase of the Mephisto laser light modulated with a chopper as a square wave at about 1 kHz.  The color bar for the phase should run from -pi to pi, and it does when I don't accidently comment out the color bar function.  Anyway, the phase is consistently pi/4 or pi/4 plus or minus pi.  Usually all three of these phases occur within the same image, as shown below.  Also, the amplitude is a factor of two or so higher than it should be where this phase jump occurs.  I think these problems are associated with the nature of the square wave.  However, there is a software bug that appears to be independent of the input data: there is a rounding error that causes the amplitude to jump to infinity at certain points.  This happened for only a dozen or so pixels so I deleted them from the amplitude plot shown below.  I am currently working on a more robust code that will use the Newton-Raphson method for nonlinear systems of equations. 

 [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. 

After many issues, I finally have some Guralp box noise. I did not measure every single channel with high resolution at the low frequencies because that would have taken about 3 years, but I could perhaps take some faster measurements for all of them if necessary.

Steve, Rana, Ben, Jenne, Alberto, Rob

UPS in the vacuum rack failed this afternoon, cutting off power to the vacuum control system.  After plugging all the stuff that had been plugged into the UPS into the wall, everything came back up.  It appears that V1 closed appropriately, TP1 spun down gracefully on its own battery, and the pressure did not rise much above 3e-6 torr. 

The UPS fizzed and smelled burnt.  Rana will order a new, bigger, better, faster one.

We added C1:Vac-CC1_pressure to the alarm handler, with the minor alarm at 5e-6 torr and the major alarm at 1e-5 torr.

Today I was able to make low frequency transfer function with DTT on megatron.  There seems to have been a timing problem, perhaps Alex fixed it or it is intermittent.

I have attached the open loop transfer function for the un-optimized system, which is at least stable to step impulses with the current filters and gains.  The next step is to optimize, transfer this knowledge to the ADC/DAC version, and hook it up to isolated ETMX.

For some reason a few minutes ago the FB DAQ crashed and I had to restarted.

Ever since July 22, the backup script that runs on fb40m has failed to ssh to ldas-cit.ligo.caltech.edu to back up our trend frames and /cvs/cds.

This was a new failure mode which the scripts didn't catch, so I only noticed it when fb40m was rebooted a couple of days ago.

Alex fixed the problem (RAID array was configured with the wrong IP address, conflicting with the outside world), and I modified the script ( /cvs/cds/caltech/scripts/backup/rsync.backup ) to handle the new directory structure Alex made.

Now the backup is current and the automated script should keep it so, at least until the next time fb40m is rebooted...

IFO pressure was 2.3 mTorr this morning,

The Maglev's foreline valve  V4 was closed so P2 rose to 4 Torr. The Maglev was running fine with V1 open.

This is a good example for V1 to be closed by interlock, because at 4 Torr foreline pressure the compression ratio for hydrocarbones goes down.

V4 was closed by interlock when TP2 lost it's drypump. The drypump's AC plug was lose.

To DO: set up  interlock  to close V1 if P2 exceeds 1 Torr

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.

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?

Stephanie and Koji

We left two carts near the PSL table.
We are using them for characterization of the tripple resonant EOM.

I turned the HEPAs back down to ~50.

[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.

 I thought slightly harder and I think that the beamsplitter stays. We will lose too much power on the first PD if we do that:

33/66:  Pwr @ PD2 = 2/3*1/3*1/2 =  1/9 Pin

            Pwr @ PD3 = 2/3*2/3*1/2 = 2/9 Pin

50:50 Pwr @ PD2 = PWR @ PD3 = 1/8 Pin

balancing them is probably better.

For the past week Dmass and I have been ordering parts and getting ready to construct our own modified version of EUCLID (figure).  Changes to the EUCLID design could include the removal of the first lens, the replacement of the cat's eye retroreflector with a lens focusing the beam waist on a mirror in that arm of the Michelson, and the removal of the linear polarizers.  A beam dump was added above the first polarizing beam splitter and the beam at Photodetector 2 was attenuated with an additional polarizing beam splitter and beam dump.  Another proposed alteration is to change the non-polarizing beam splitter from 50/50 to 33/66.  By changing the reflectivity to 66\%, less power coming into the non-polarizing beam splitter would be ``lost" at the reference detector (1/3 instead of 1/2), and on the return trip less power would be lost at the polarizing beam splitter (1/6 instead of 1/4).  Also, here's a noise plot comparing a few displacement sensors that are used to the shot noise levels for the three designs I've been looking at.

Stephanie has needed the doors to the PSL open all day, and still has them open, so I just turned the HEPAs on high. 

 Here we trended also the PMC and the MZ. The drop in the PMC happens at the same rate as the MOPA's.

That let us think that the FSS transmitteed power has gone down because of the reference cavity progressive misalignment to the laser beam.

We need to adjust that alignment sometime.

The drop in the NPRO output power (upper row, 3rd plot: Ch10 C1:PSL_126MOPA_126MON) accompained an increase of "fuzziness" in PMCTRANSPD and both coincided in time with the day we tempoarirly removed the flap from the laser chiller's chiller (July 14 2009).

 I've now also trended the MOPA output power for the last 200 days to check a possible correlation with the FSS reflected power. See attachment.

The trend shows that the laser power has decayed but it seems that the FSS reflected power has done it even faster: 30% drop in the FSS vs 7% for the MOPA in the last 60 days (attachment n.2).

 Yesterday Alex started transferring the data records to the new storage unit. That prevented us from accessing the trends for a fe hours.

The process had been completed and now we can read the trends again.

The 40m-IFO vacuum envelope doors are sealed with dual viton O-rings and they are pumped through the annulos lines.

This allows easy access into the chambers. The compression of the o-rings are controlled by the o-ring grooves.

The OOC (output optic chamber)'s west side door has no such groove and it is sealed by just one single O-ring.

We have to protect this O-ring from total compression by 3 shims as shown below.

There were control shims in place before and they disappeared.

Let's remember that these shims are essential to keep our vacuum system in good condition.

The daq on megatron was nuts.  Alex and I discovered that there was no gds installation for site_letter=C (i.e. Caltech) so the default M was being used (for MIT).  Apparently we are the first Caltech installation.  We added the appropriate line to the RCG Makefile and recompiled and reinstalled (at 16K).  Now DV looks good on MDP and MDC, and I made a transfer function that replicates  bounce-roll filter.  So DTT works too.

I installed an improvised version of PSL output beam iris at the output periscope last week.

I added a clock to the PMC medm screen.

I made a backup of the original file in the same directory and named it *.bk20090805

We can't read minute trends from either Dataviewer or loadLIGOData from before 11am this morning. 

fb:/frames>du -skh minute-trend-frames/
 106G   minute-trend-frames


So the frames are still on the disk.  We just can't get them with our usual tools (NDS).

 Trying to read 60 days of minute trends from C1:PSL-PMC_TRANSPD yields:

Connecting to NDS Server fb40m (TCP port 8088)
Connecting.... done
258.0 minutes of trend displayed
read(); errno=9
read(); errno=9
T0=09-06-06-22-34-02; Length=5184000 (s)
No data output.


Trying to read 3 seconds of full data works.

Second trends are readable after about 4am UTC this morning, which is about 9 pm last night.

After investigating this a bit further, I discovered that some of the components in the circuit were pressed firmly up against the inside of the box, and when they were moved, the impedance plot changed shape dramatically. I think that originally, the components were not pressed against the box, but the box's SMA joint was rather loose; when I connected this to the SMA cable, I tightened it, and this seems to have twisted the circuit around inside the box, pushing the components up against the side. I have fixed the twisting, and since the SMA joint is now tight, the circuit should no longer have any twisting problems.

A new plot is attached, showing the impedance of the circuit with nothing attached (blue), with the SMA cable and EOM attached (green), and with the EOM attached directly to it taken last friday with the old calibration of the setup (red). All three curves look roughly the same; the center peak is shifted slightly between the three curves, but the circuit with SMA and EOM is the version we'll be using, and it's central peak is close to the correct value.

I have spent the past couple of days gathering optics and mounts so that I can observe the modulation of the EOM attached to the circuit I built using the optical spectrum analyzer (OSA). A rough diagram of the planned layout is attached.

I also built a short SMA cable so that the EOM did not have to be connected directly to the circuit box. The cable is shown attached to the EOM and circuit box in the attached photo. After checking to make sure that all of the connections in the cable were sound, I remeasured the input impedance of the circuit; the impedance measurement (black) is shown in the attached plot with the impedance before the SMA cable was added with and without the box (green and blue, respectively--these two are almost identical). The new impedance has a strange shape compared to the original measurements; I'd like to understand this a little better, since adding extra inductance in LTSpice doesn't seem to have that effect. Since I had already taken apart the setup used for the previous impedance measurements, I had to rebuild and recalibrate the setup; I guess the difference could be something about the new calibration, but I don't really think that that's the case.

See attachments

FB40m up and running again after restarting the DAQ.

After the mini boot fest that Jenne did today, I checked whether that fixed the overflow issues we yesterday prevented the alignemnt of the arms. 

I ran the alignment script for the arms getting 0.85 for TRX and 0.75 for TRY: low values.

After I ran the script ,C1SUSVME1 and C1SUSVME2 started having problems with the FE SYNC (counter at 16378). I rebooted those two and fix the sync problem but the transmitted powers didn't improve.

Are we still having problem due to MC misalignment?

Koji, Peter

We put a simple pendulum into the MDP model, and everything communicates.  We're still having some kind of TP or daq problem, so we're still in debugging mode.  We went back to 32K in the .adl's, and when driving MDP,  the MDC-ETMX_POS_OUT is nasty, it follows the sine wave envelope but goes to zero 16 times per second.

The breakout boards have arrived.  The plan is to fix this daq problem, then demonstrate the model MDC/MDP system.  Then we'll switch to the "external" system (called SAM) and match control TF to the model.  Then we'd like to hook up ETMX, and run the system isolated from the rest of the IFO.  Finally we'd like to tie it into the IFO using reflective memory.

Just start by re-setting them to zero.  Then you have to figure out what's causing them to saturate by watching time series and looking at spectra.

Last night Rana noticed that the overflows on the ITM and ETM coils were a crazy huge number.  Today I rebooted c1dcuepics, c1iovme, c1sosvme, c1susvme1 and c1susvme2 (in that order).  Rob helped me burt restore losepics and iscepics, which needs to be done whenever you reboot the epics computer.

Unfortunately this didn't help the overflow problem at all.  I don't know what to do about that.

Koji, Pete

Yesterday we found that the channel C1:MDP-POS_EXC looked distorted and had what appeared to be doubled frequency componenets, in the dataviewer.  This was because the dcu_rate in the file /caltech/target/fb/daqdrc was set to 16K while the adl file was set to 32K.  When daqdrc was corrected it was fixed.  I am going to recompile and run all these models at 16K.  Once the 40 m moves over to the new front end system, we may find it advantageous to take advantage of the faster speeds, but maybe it's a good idea to get everything working at 16K first.

The MC_trans QPD Pitch and Yaw readout on the Lock_MC screen are now normalized by the trans_sum. I used the method described in my entry elog 1488. 

/caltech/target/c1iool0/ioo.db now includes:

grecord(calc, "C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_P")
{
        field(INPA, "C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_VERT")
        field(INPB, "C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_SUM")
        field(SCAN, ".1 second")
        field(PREC, "3")
        field(CALC, "A/B")
}

grecord(calc, "C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_Y")
{
        field(INPA, "C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_HOR")
        field(INPB, "C1:IOO-MC_TRANS_SUM")
        field(SCAN, ".1 second")
        field(PREC, "3")
        field(CALC, "A/B")
}

The Lock_MC screen was changed to show these new P and Y channels. 

The camera wasn't working because the router has no built-in dhcp server.  We had to manually start the server after rebooting the computer.

Jenne, Koji, Rana

After fixing up the Mode Cleaner a bit more (fiddling more with the MC_align sliders to get the alignment before locking, making sure that it is able to lock), we noticed that the MC Trans path could use some help. To align the MC, we put MC1 and MC3 back into the position where Rob left it on Thursday and then maximized the transmission with MC2. Then we went back and maximized with MC1/3 keeping in mind the Faraday. We got a good transmission and the X-arm had a transmission of 0.8 without us touching its alignment.

Upon looking at the AP table portion of the MC_trans path, we decided that it was all pretty bad.  The light travels around the edge of the AP table, then out the corner of the table toward the PSL table.  A periscope brings it down to the level of the PSL table, and then it travels through a few optics to the MC_trans QPD. 

The light was clipping on the way through the periscope, and so the MC_trans QPD was totally unreliable as a method of fine-tuning the alignment of the Mode Cleaner.  Ideally we'd like to be able to maximize MC_trans, and say that that's a good MC alignment, but that doesn't work when the beam is clipped.

Things done:

1. The first turning mirror on the AP table after the beam comes out of the vacuum was changed from a 1" optic to a 2" optic, because the spot size is ~4-6mm.  We were careful to avoid clipping the OMCT beam, by using a nifty U200 mount (C-shaped instead of ring-shaped). 

2.  We placed a lens with a RoC of 1m (focal length for 1064nm is ~2m), a 2" optic, between the first two mirrors, to help keep the beam small-ish when it gets to the periscope, to help avoid clipping.

3. Rana adjusted the angle of the upper periscope mirror, because even when the beam was centered on the steering mirror directly in front of the periscope and the spot was centered on the first periscope mirror, the beam wouldn't hit the bottom periscope mirror. 

4. We noticed that the bottom periscope mirror was mounted much too low.  It was mounted as if the optics after it were 3" high, which is true for all of the input optics on the PSL table.  However, for the MC_trans stuff, all the optics are 4".  We moved the periscope up one hole, which made it the correct height.

5. We removed the skinny beam tube which guided/protected the beam coming off the periscope after a steering mirror since it (a) wasn't necessary and (b) was clipping the beam. We cannot use such skinny tubes anymore Steve.

6. There was a lens just before the 2nd steering mirror on the PSL table portion, which we removed since we had placed the other lens earlier in the path.  2 lenses made the beam too skinny at the QPD.

7.  After this 2nd steering mirror, there had been a pickoff, to send a bit of beam at a crazy angle over to the RFAM mon, which we removed.  This results in a much brighter beam at the MC_trans QPD, and at the camera.  The QPDs readouts are now a factor of ~3.5 higher than they used to be.  These (especially the camera) could use some ND-filtering action.

8.  The steering optic directly in front of the MC_trans QPD is a beamsplitter, and instead of dumping the light which doesn't go to the MC_trans QPD, we used this to go over to the RFAM mon (instead of the pickoff which we had removed). 

9.  Koji fixed up the optics directly in front of the RFAM mon, accomodating the new position of the input light (now at a much more reasonable angle, and about 15cm farther back from the PD). Note the beam dump which is preventing the cables from the FSS board from entering the beam path. This included removing an ND filter wheel, so the RFAM mon values will all be higher now.  Koji also has the beam going to the PD going at a slight angle, so that the beam isn't directly reflected on itself, so that it can be dumped.

10. We aligned the beam onto the MC_trans QPD using the first steering mirror on the PSL table.

11. We also removed the giant wall of beam dumps separating the squeezing section of the table from the rest of the table.

Alberto will elog things about the RFAM mon, including different values of the PD output, etc.

Still on the to-do list:

A.  Replace the second steering mirror on the AP table after the MC_trans light leaves the vacuum with a 2" optic, since the lens we placed isn't tight enough to make the spot small there yet.  Us a U200A mount if possible, because they are really nice mounts.

B.  Put an ND filter in front of the MC_trans camera, because the image is too bright.

C.  Normalize the MC_trans QPD - the horz and vert are pretty much direct voltage readouts, with no normalization.  They should be divided by the DC value.  This lack of normalization results in higher sensitivity to input pointing.

D.  Long term, next time someone wants to optimize the MC_trans path, move all the optics, including the MC_trans QPD and the camera closer to the periscope on the PSL table.  There's no reason for the beam to be traveling nearly the full width of the PSL table when we're not manuvering around squeezing stuff.

E. Never, ever purchase these horrible U100 or U200 mounts with the full ring and the little plastic clips. They are the "AC28" version. Bad, bad, bad.

Image 1:  The new setup of the AP table, Mc_trans portion. 

Image 2:  New setup of the MC_trans part of the PSL table.

While aligning the optics, we tried to start up the CCD.  Although nothing should have changed since the last time I used it, the code claimed it could not find the camera.  All the right leds are lit up.  The only indication that something is awry is that the yellow led on the camera isn't blinking as it does when there is ethernet activity.  

The mode cleaner seems to be locking again.  I've manually unlocked it a few times in the past 20min, and most of the time it catches lock again (maybe about 80% of the time).  Other times, it starts to lock in a bad mode, and can't fix itself, so I unlock it, and let it restart and it usually does fine the second time around. 

I'd like it to be a little more robust, but I'm having a bit of trouble zeroing in on the optimal alignment for quickest, most durable lock aquisition of the MC.  Right now I'm going to leave it for a little while to make sure it doesn't fall apart.

I am (was) able to get the mode cleaner mostly locked, but because WFS2 wasn't centered, the MC would drift, then lose lock.  I recentered both the WFS (after unlocking the MC and the MZ), and am now about to commence relocking both of those.

/end{quick update}

Note to self:  WFS get centered based on the direct reflection from MC1.  Once the MC is close enough, the WFS are enabled, and they twiddle all 3 MC mirrors to minimize their error signal.  Moral of the story: make sure the WFS are centered.