ELOG 40m

Software Installation

Software install on OMS

[Alex, Sam]

We spent a little time this morning working on OMS and getting things restarted. A few changes were made. 1) We put openmotif on OMS so that the burtrb doesn't throw that crappy libXm any more. 2) We upgraded OMS to a 32 kHz sampling rate from 2 kHz. All the filters will have to be changed. We also added a PDH filter path to maybe feedback PDH signals cuz that will be cool. Maybe someday I will write up the very cool channel adding procedure.

Mon Oct 29 23:25:42 2007

tobin

Software Installation

CDS

frames mounted

I mounted the frames directory on mafalda and linux3. It's intentionally not listed in the /etc/fstab so that an fb crash won't prevent the controls machines from booting. The command to mount the frames directory is:

mount fb40m:/frames/frames /frames

Thu Oct 18 14:52:35 2007

test

X-(:P;(:))

Thu Oct 18 15:03:14 2007

Mon Oct 22 12:02:59 2007

ajw

STACIS as microseismic shaker

General

In case we ever want to use our Stacis systems as shakers, check this:
link

Thu Oct 25 22:02:58 2007

In light of the SoCal fires, I turned the PSL HEPAs up to 100%.

Fri Oct 26 09:10:17 2007

The fires are out, lab particle counts are up.
Psl HEPAs are at 100% and mobel HEPAs are just turned on
20 days plot and 5 hrs plot below

Fri Oct 26 16:19:29 2007

We would like to measure the absorption of the mode cleaner optics. The plan is to repeat <a href="http://ilog.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:7285/mLIGO/Cleaning_the_Mode_Cleaner">Valera's experiment</a> in which we track the MC's thermal resonances to infer their power absorption. Last night Rana and I hooked up a lock-in amplifier to heterodyne the MC servo signal by 28 kHz and piped the output into an ADC using the MC_AO channel. We did not find any resonances.

Valera recommends we drive the POS of the three MC optics with bandlimited noise to excite the resonances.

Mon Oct 29 09:16:31 2007

We had no filament current since last power glitch of Oct. 8, 2007
First I thought that the filament was lost, but it was only bad contact.
The rga head pins were oxidized. Rga was turned back on last Friday.
It's temp is 55.3C normal

Mon Oct 29 09:46:50 2007

Pumpdown 64 pumped by maglev for 125 days
pd64-m-d125

Rob, can you tell me, when did the fire start on this plot?

Tue Oct 30 16:55:40 2007

tobin

Drag-wiping perfected

Steve, Tobin

Steve procured an assortment of syringes from the bio storeroom and we practiced drag-wiping the SOS in the flow bench. Using a 50 microliter Hamilton syringe to deliver 16 microliters of methanol seems perfect for drag-wiping the small optics. Drag-wiping in the downward direction seems to work very well, since we can squirt the optic directly in the center, and the (half) piece of kodak lens tissue fits easily between the bottom two earthquake stops.

Wed Oct 31 10:31:23 2007

Andrey Rodionov

VAC

Venting is in progress

We (Steve, David, Andrey) started venting the vacuum system at 9.50AM Wednesday morning.

Wed Oct 31 15:02:59 2007

tobin

Mode Cleaner Mode Tracking

IOO

I processed the heterodyned mode cleaner data yesterday, tracking the three 28 kHz modes corresponding to MC1, MC2, and MC3. Unfortuntately the effect of our MC power chopping is totally swamped by ambient temperature changes. Attached are two plots, one with the tracked mode frequencies, and the other containing dataviewer trends with the MC transmitted power and the room temperature. Additionally, the matlab scripts are attached in a zip file.

Wed Oct 31 19:26:08 2007

Andrey Rodionov

Photographs of "Mode-Cleaner Entrance"

General

Here are the pictures of "inside the chamber".

Thu Nov 1 09:17:27 2007

Yesterday before vent I could not lock MC, therfore I could not measure the
transmitted power at MC2
The vent went well. We had lots of help.

We could not find the Nikon D40
PLEASE BORROW THINGS when taking them away
and bring them back promtly.

The laser was turned off for better visibility.

I see clean room frorks laying around here and there.
Please put them away so we do not carry excess particles into the chamber.

Tue Oct 30 19:32:13 2007

I noticed that the conlogger wasn't running. It looks like it hasn't been running since October 11th. I modified the restart_conlogger script to insist that it run on op340m instead of op440m, and then ran it on op340m.

Wed Oct 31 08:33:54 2007

There was a power outage during the day yesterday; whoever was around should post something here about the
exact times. Andrey and David and Tobin got the computers back up - there were some hiccups which you can
read about in David's forthcoming elog entry.

We restarted a few of the locking scripts on op340m: FSSSlowServo, MCautolocker. Along with the updates
to the cold restart procedures we have to put an entry in there for op340m and a list of what scripts
to restart.

David tuned up the FSS Slow PID parameters a little; he and Andrey will log some entry about the proper
PID recipe very soon. We tested the new settings and the step response looks good.

We got the MC locking with no fuss. The 5.6 EQ in San Francisco tripped all of the watchdogs and I upped
the trip levels to keep them OK. We should hound Rob relentlessly to put the watchdog rampdown.pl into
the crontab for op340m.

Wed Oct 31 08:38:35 2007

The MC was having some trouble staying locked yesterday. I tracked this down to some steps in the last
half of the mcup script; not sure exactly which ones.

It was doing something that made the FAST of the PSL go to a rail too fast for the SLOW to fix.
So, I broke the script in half so that the autolocker only runs the first part. We'll need to
fix this before any CM locking can occur.

We also need someone to take a look at the FSS Autolocker; its ill.

Fri Oct 19 16:11:38 2007

Sam and I locked the laser to the OMC cavity and looked at the error signal as a function of the voltage applied to the OMC PZT.
Here are two plots showing the response as a function of frequency from 1 kHz to 100 kHz and another high-res response in the region of 4.5 kHz to 10 kHz.

Sat Oct 20 11:54:13 2007

[Rich, Chub, Pinkesh, Chris, Sam]

Friday the 18th was a busy day in OMC land. Both DCPDs were mounted to the glass breadboard and the OMC-SUS structure was rebuilt to the point that an aluminum dummy mass is hanging, unbalanced. The OSEMs have not be put on the table cloth yet, but everything is hanging free. As for the DCPDs, if you recall one beam is 3mm off center from the DCPD tombstone. Fortunately, one DCPD is nearly 3mm offcenter from the case in the right direction, so the errors nearly cancel. The DCPD is too high, so the beam isn't quite centered, but they're close. We'll get photos of the beam positions in someday. Also, the DC gain between the two PDs is, at first glance, different by 15%. DCPD1, the one seen in transmission has 315 mV of signal while DCPD2 has 280 mV. Not sure why, could be because of beam alignment or tolerances in the Preamp or the angle incident on the diode or the QE of the diodes. The glass cans have *not* been removed.

Mon Oct 22 19:27:14 2007

pkp

PZT calibration/ transfer function.

We measured the PZT transfer function by comparing the PZT response of the circuit with the cavity in the loop, with that of the circuit without the cavity in the loop. Basically measure the transfer function of the whole loop with the laser/PZT and Op-amps in it. Then take another measurement of the transfer function of everything else besides the PZT and from both these functions, we can calculate the PZT response.

The calibration was done by using the error signal response to a triangular wave of volts applied to the PZT. A measurement of the slope of the error signal , which has three zero-crossings as the cavity sweeps through the sidebands, gives us the Volts/Hz response. In order to derive a frequency calibration of the x axis, we assume that the first zero crossing corresponds to the first side band (-29.5 MHz) and the third one corresponds with the other sideband (+29.5 MHz). And then by using the fact that we know the response of the cavity to a constant frequency shift, we can use the Volts/Hz measurement to calculate the Volts/nm calibration. The slope that was calculated was 3.2e-6 V/Hz and using the fact that the cavity is 1 m in length and the frequency is 1064 nm, we get a calibration of 0.9022 V/nm.

Tue Oct 23 09:01:00 2007

rana

PZT calibration/ transfer function.

Are you sure that the error signal sweep is not saturated on the top ends? This is usually the downfall
of this calibration method.

Tue Oct 23 11:08:20 2007

There are big brush fires around LA
40 days plot show no effect in the 40m lab

Wed Oct 24 01:43:32 2007

Andrey Rodionov

PDF-file -> Will report about first results for XARM during Wednesday meeting

General

Here is the pdf-file with some graphs showing first results for XARM optimization.

We will discuss alltogether during our Wednesday meeting which starts at 2.40PM. Probably it would be necessary to project this pdf-file to the big screen,
so someone should bring laptop and probably connect it to the projector. I do not have a laptop.

See you on that meeting.

Wed Oct 24 08:58:09 2007

C1:PSL-126MOPA_HTEMP is 19.3C

Half of the chiller's air intake was covered by loose paper

Thu Oct 25 17:52:45 2007

[Rich, Chub, Pinkesh, Sam]

Yesterday we got the QPD, OTAS, and PZT cabling harness integrated with the OMC. We found a few things out, not all of them good. The QPDs went on no problem and could be fairly well aligned by hand. We "aligned" them by looking at all four channels of the QPD on the scope and seeing that there is signal. Since the beam is omega = 0.5 mm, this is a reasonable adjustment. We then connected the OTAS connector to the OTAS and found that the heater on the OTAS was bonded on about 30 degrees rotated from its intended position. This rotated the connector into the beam and caused a visible amount of scattering. This wasn't really a disaster until I removed the connector from the heater and broke the heater off of the aluminum parts of the OTAS. Two steps backwards, one step forward. After the OMC, OMC-SUS integration test we will re-bond the heater to the aluminum using VacSeal. In the meantime, the OMC has been moved to Bridge 056 for integration with the OMC-SUS. More on that as we make progress.

Thu Oct 25 23:35:36 2007

[Pinkesh, Sam]

We tried, convicted and hung the OMC today. The OMC was found guilty of being overweight, and unsymmetrically balanced. The unsymmetry was kind of expected and was corrected with a hefty stack of counterweights positioned over the counterweighting holes. The stacks will be measured at some future date and correctly sized objects machined. The overweightness showed up when the level hanging breadboard was about 5 mm low. This showed up in the board height above the table as well as the OSEM flag positions within their holes. The problem was remedied with a liposuction of the intermediate mass. We removed both small vertical cylinder weights that Chris added, and then we removed the heavy steel transverse weight that can be used to adjust the tip around the long axis (I forgot what its called).

The top of the breadboard ended up about 154 mm off the table. The breadboard is 39 mm thick, and the optics are centered (30 - 12.7) = 17.3 mm below the surface for a as hanging beams height of 154 -39 - 17.3 = 97.7 mm or about an 0.150 inches lower than we were aiming for. Can I get a refund?

We screwed up in multiple ways:

The slotted disks that capture the wires do not have the alignment bore used to center the wire in the hole
We didn't correctly route the far field QPD cable so it runs funny
We didn't have a tool which could be used to get two of the DCPD preamp box mounting screws (which are M3's chub!)
We don't have the cable clamps to tie off the electrical cables to the intermediate mass
We don't have any of the cabling from the OMC-SUS top to the rack so we can't test anything
We haven't uploaded pretty pictures for all to see

We left the OMC partially suspended by the OMC-SUS and partly resting on the installation lab jacks which are currently acting as EQ stops. After we fix the cabling we will more permanently hang it. PS, It looks like the REFL beam extraction will be tricky so we need to get on that....

Fri Oct 26 17:34:43 2007

OMC + earthquake stops

[Chub, chris, Pinkesh, Sam]

Last night we hugn the OMC for the first time and came up with a bunch of pictures and some problems. Today we address some of the problems and, of course, make new problems. We replaced the flat slotted disks with the fitted slotted disks that are made to fit into the counterbore of the breadboard. This changed the balance slightly and required a more symmetric distribution of mass. It probably did not change the total mass very much. We did find that the amount of cable hanging down strongly affected the breadboard balance and may also have contributed to the changing balance.

We also attached earthquake stops and ran into a few problems:

The bottom plate of the EQ stops is too thick so that it bumps into the tombstones
The vertical member on the "waist" EQ stops is too close to the breadboard, possibly interfering with the REFL beam
The "waist" EQ stops are made from a thin plate that doesn't have enough thickness to mount helicoils in
Helicoil weren't loaded in the correct bottom EQ stops
The DCPD cable loops over the end EQ stop looking nasty but not actually making contact

However, with a little bit of jimmying, the EQ stops are arrayed at all points within a few mm of the breadboard. Meanwhile, Chub has cabled up all the satellite modules and DCPD modules and Pinkesh is working on getting data into the digital system so we can start playing games. Tonight, I intend to mount a laser in Rana's lab and fiber couple a beam into the 056 room so we can start testing the suspended OMC.

Tue Oct 30 00:47:29 2007

I did a bunch of MC ringdown measurements using the PD that Rob set up. The idea is to put a fast PD (PDA255)
looking at the transmission through MC2 after focusing by a fast lens. The input to the MC is turned off fast
by flipping the sign of the FSS (Andri Gretarsson's technique).

With the laptop sitting on the MC can, its easy to repeat many ringdowns fast:

- Turn off the MC autolocker. Relock the MC with only the acquisition settings; no boosts
  and no RGs. This makes it re-acquire fast. Turn the MC-WFS gain down to 0.001 so that
  it keeps it slowly aligned but does not drift off when you lose lock.

- Use low-ish gain on the FSS. 10 dB lower than nominal is fine.

- Setup the o'scope (100 MHz BW or greater) to do single shot trigger on the MC2 trans.

- Flip FSS sign.

- Quickly flip sign back and waggle common gain to get FSS to stop oscillating. MC
  should relock in seconds.

Clearly one can scriptify this all just by hooking up the scope to the ethernet port.

Attached are a bunch of PNG of the ringdowns as well as a tarball with the actual data. A sugar
napoleon to whomever can explain the 7 us period of the wiggle before the vent!

Tue Oct 30 20:15:24 2007

Rana, Tobin

Largish (M5.6) earthquake in San Francisco sent our optics swinging.

Wed Oct 31 08:34:35 2007

In the end, we were unable to get a good scatter measurement just because we ran out of steam. The idea was to get a frame
grab image of MC2 but that involves getting an unsaturated image.

In the end we settle for the ringdowns, Rob's (so far unlogged) cavity pole measurement, and the MC transmission numbers. They
all point to ~100-150 ppm scatter loss per mirror. We'll see what happens after wiping.

Wed Oct 31 09:45:28 2007

Resolution to DAQland saga

[Jay, Sam]

We did a rough accounting for the linear delay this morning and it comes out more or less correct. The 10 kHz 3rd order butterworth AA/AI filter gives ~90 degrees of phase at 6 kHz, or 42 microseconds. Taken together, the two AA and AI filters are worth 80 microseconds. The 1.5 sample digital delay is worth 1.5/32768 = 45 microseconds. The remaining 160 - 125 = 35 microseconds is most likely taken up by the 64 kHz to 32 kHz decimation routine, assuming this isn't accounted for already in the 1.5 sample digital delay.

It remains to be seen whether this phase delay is good enough to lock the laser to the OMC cavity

Wed Oct 31 23:55:17 2007

The 4 QPDs for the OMC have been installed in the 056 at the test setup. All 4 QPDs work and have medm screens located under C2TPT. The breadboard mounted QPDs are not very well centered so their signal is somewhat crappy. But all 4 QPDs definitely see plenty of light. I include light and dark spectra below. QPDs 1-2 are table-mounted and QPD 2 is labeled with a bit of blue tape. QDPs 3-4 are mounted on the OMC. QPD3 is the near field detector and QPD4 is the far field. In other words, QPD3 is closest to the input coupler and QPD4 is farthest.

Included below are some spectra of the QPDs with and without light. For QPDs 1 & 2, the light source is just room lights, while 3&4 have the laser in the nominal OMC configuration with a few mWs as source. The noise at 100 Hz is about 100 microvolts / rtHz. If I recall correctly, the QPDs have 5 kOhm transimpedance (right Rich?) so this is 20 nanoamps / rtHz of current noise at the QPD.

Thu Nov 1 01:28:04 2007

First digital lock of OMC

[Pinkesh, Sam]

We locked a fiber based NPRO to the suspended OMC tonight using the TPT digital control system. To control the laser frequency, we took the PZT AI output and ran it on a BNC cable down the hallway to the Thorlabs HV box. The Thorlabs is a singled ended unit so we connected the AI positive terminal only and grounded the BNC to the AI shield. We could get a -6 to 1.5 V throw in this method which fed into the 10 k resisotr + 9 V battery at the input of the HV box. The HV out ran to the NPRO PZT fast input.

We derived our error signal from a PDA255 in reflection with a 29.5 MHz PDH lock. The signal feeds into one of the unused Tip/Tilt AA channels and is passed to the PZT LSC drive through the TPT_PDH1 filter bank. In the PZT_LSC filter we put a single pole at 1 Hz which, together with the phase we mentioned the other night (180 degrees at 3 kHz) should allow a 1 kHz-ish loop. In practice, as shown below, we got a 650 Hz UGF with 45 degrees of phase margin and about 6 dB of gain margin.

The Lower figure shows the error point spectrum with 3 settings. REF0 in blue shows lots of gain peaking at 1.5 kHz-ish, just where its expected - the gain was -40. The REF1 has gain of -20 and shows no gain peaking. The current trace in red shows some gain peaking cuz the alignment is better but it also has included a 1^2:20^2 boost which totally crushes the low frequency noise. We should do a better loop sweep after getting the alignment right so we can see how much boost it will really take.

Just for fun, we are leaving it locked overnight and recording the PZT_LSC data for posterity.

Mon Nov 5 22:24:38 2007

Andrey, Steve

Pumping down goes smoothly

VAC

We (Steve and Andrey) started pumping down at 3.25PM today. At 9 PM we turned off the rotary pump, and turned on turbomolecular pumps.

By 10.10PM we reached the pressure 1 milliTorr, and the current status is "Vacuum Normal". We leave the turbopumps on for the night, and as it is pretty late for Steve, we are going home.

P.S. Steve was very displeased with the standard selection of "Type" of messages, he would like to extend that list.

Wed Nov 7 14:01:31 2007

Frequency and Intensity noise

One of the biggest problems I had using the PZT to lock was excessive noise. I did a little noise hunting and found that the problem was the cable running from the rack to the laser fast input. As a reminder, the laser has a 4 MHz / volt fast input. We require about 300 MHz to go one FSR, so there is a Thorlabs HV box between at the NPRO fast input which takes 0-10 V -> 0-150 V. The 150 V HV range is worth about 600 MHz of NPRO frequency.

OLD SETUP: Single side of DAC differential (10 Vpp) -> 9V in series with 10 kOhm -> 10 kOhm input impedance of Thorlabs HV -> NPRO

We used the single side of the DAC differential because we didn't have a differential receiver. This turned out to be a bad idea because the cable picks up every 60 Hz harmonic known to man kind.

NEW SETUP: Digital conditioning -> DAC differential (digitally limited to 0 - 1 V) -> SR560 in A-B mode gain 10 (0 - 10 V output)-> Thorlabs HV -> NPRO.

This has almost no 60 Hz noise and works much, much better. Moral of the story, ALWAYS USE DIFFERENTIAL SIGNALS DIFFERENTIALLY !

Note that I may be saturating the SR560 with 10 V output, Its spec'd for 10 Vpp output with 1 VDC max input. I don't know whether or not it can push 10 V out....

Fri Nov 9 00:01:24 2007

OMC mechanical resonances (Tap tap tappy tap)

[Pinkesh, Aidan, Sam]

We did a tap-tap-tappy-tap test of the OMC to try to find its resonances. We looked at some combination of the PDH error signal and the DCPD signal in a couple of different noise configurations. The data included below shows tapping of the major tombstone objects as well the breadboard. I don't see any strong evidence of resonances below the very sharp resonance at 1300 Hz (which I interpret as the diving board mode of the breadboard). If I get free, I 'll post some plots of the different breadboard resonances you can excite by tapping in different places.

(The "normalized" tapping response is abs(tap - reference)./reference.)

Wed Nov 14 07:48:38 2007

[Snipped from an email]

1) Last Friday Pinkesh and I set the OMC up with only the top three OSEMs and took a vertical transfer function. We had removed the other OSEMs due to difficulty of aligning all OSEMs with the weight of the bench etc bringing the top mass lower than the tablecloth can accommodate. See attached TF.Clearly there are extra peaks (we only expect two with a zero in between) and my belief is that at least some of them are coupling of other degrees of freedom caused by the electrical wiring. Pinkesh and I also noticed the difficulty of maintaining alignment if cables got touched and moved around. So.....

2) Yesterday Dennis and I took a look at how much moving a cable bundle around (with the peak shielding) changed the DC alignment. In a not too precise experiment ( using HeNe laser reflecting off the bench onto a surface ~ 1 metre away) we saw that we could reposition the beam one or two mm in yaw and pitch. This corresponds to ~ one or two mrad which is ~ the range of the OSEM DC alignment. We discussed possibility of removing the cabling from the middle mass, removing the peak and taking it from the bench directly to the structure above. I asked Chub if he could make an equivalent bundle of wires as those from the two preamps to see what happens if we repeat the "moving bundle" experiment. So...

3) Today Chub removed the cabling going to the preamps and we replaced it with a mock up of wire bundle going directly from the preamps to the structure above. See attached picture. The wires are only attached to the preamp boxes weighted down with masses but the bundle is clamped at the top. We repeated the "wiggle the bundle" test and couldnt see any apparent movement ( so maybe it is at most sub-mm). The cable bundle feels softer.

The next thing Chub did was to remove the second bundle ( from photodiodes, heater, pzt) from its attachment to the middle mass and strip off the peek. It is now also going to the top of the structure directly. The whole suspension now appears freer. We discussed with Dennis the "dressing " of the wires. There are some minor difficulties about how to take wires from the bright side to the dark side, but in general it looks like that the wires forming the second "bundle" could be brought to the "terminal block" mounted on the dark side and from there looped up to the top of the structure. We would have to try all this of course to see the wiring doesnt get in the way of other things (e.g. the L and R OSEMs). However this might be the way forward. So...

4) Tomorrow Pinkesh and I will check the alignment and then repeat the vertical transfer function measurement with the two bundles as they are going from bench to top of structure. We might even do a horizontal one if the middle mass is now within range of the tablecloth.
We can then remove preamp cables completely and lay the second bundle of cables on the optical bench and repeat the TFs.

The next thing will be to weigh the bench plus cables. This will allow us to
a) work out what counterbalance weights are needed - and then get them manufactured
b) firm up on how to handle the extra mass in terms of getting the masses at the correct height.

And in parallel Chub will work on the revised layout of cabling.

Looking a little further ahead we can also get some stiffness measurements made on the revised bundle design ( using Bob's method which Alejandro also used) and fold into Dennis's model to get some sanity check the isolation.

I think that's it for now. Comments etc are of course welcome.

Norna

114

Mon Nov 19 14:19:25 2007

The construction personal successfully jackhemmered a fence around the "Drever's parking slot"
There is no parking space available close by

122

Mon Nov 26 10:17:31 2007

steve

etmy sus damping restored

SUS

20 days plot is showing etmy loosing damping 4 times.
I zoomed in with each event. Three of them could of been triggered
by garbage loading just outside. However attachment 2 plot demonstrating that small earthquake or seismic event
did not tripped etmy damping.
The fourth event was preceded by a 4-5 hrs of continous rise of the rms motion at C1:SUS-ETMY_LLPD_VAR

129

Wed Nov 28 08:47:29 2007

The rga is not working since Nov 10
The controller is broken.
pd65-m-d23

139

Thu Nov 29 11:10:54 2007

Without the RGA controller responding, the RGAlogger script just hangs. Rather than fix it, I just put it to sleep by commenting out the line in op440m crontab file. Once we get it running again, we'll move the cronjob to op340m.

153

Sun Dec 2 17:37:33 2007

rana