ELOG 40m

Steve and Matt moved the accelerometers and seismometers today.
The accelerometers are now placed around the MC and the seismometer is in-between MC1 & MC2.

We have changed the names of the acc channels to reflect whether they are close to MC1/MC3
or MC2. We tested the accelerometer to channel name mapping by switching gains at the wilcoxon
breakout box and also by tapping. It seems now that the previous setup near the ITMX/ETMX had
some few channels mislabeled which would have given some confusing results.

Alex, Jay, and Rolf came over today and installed, then de-installed some of the hardware for
sending the PEM channels over to the C1ASS machine where the adaptive filter front end will go.
Everything should be back to the way it was...hopefully, the guys will modify the ADCU PEM
code to send the signals to the new FE over the reflective memory net and then send them to the
MCL inputs of the suspensions. So the first incarnation should use the accelerometers and seismometer
to drive MC1 and/or MC3.

369

Wed Mar 12 00:36:52 2008

I used the MISO FIR Wiener matlab code to see how well we might do in principle.

The attached 3 page PDF file shows the MC_L control signal (force on MC2) and the residual
after subtracting off the accelerometer and seismometer using a 32 Hz sample rate and
512 taps (page 1), 1024 taps (page 2), and 2048 taps (page 3). As Matt smarmily points out,
there's not a lot to win by going beyond 512; maybe a factor of sqrt(2) for a factor of 4
tap number.

370

Wed Mar 12 00:40:35 2008

Same as above but with 2048 taps and a 128 Hz sample rate. Does much better at the 16 Hz bounce mode.

371

Wed Mar 12 00:47:26 2008

And this is a cool snapshot showing how this operation used 16 cores on menkar !

373

Thu Mar 13 02:52:06 2008

Today we have tried to use the reflected signal demodulated at 3*f1 ~ 99 MHz (REFL31) for length control.
This signal is cool because it is generated by the beating of sidebands, so it is not very sensitive to what the carrier does inside the IFO.
In particular, its gain and the demodulation phase shouldn't change much while changing the CARM offset during the locking sequence.
The idea is therefore to use REFL31_I and REFL31_Q for controlling MICH and PRCL, with the goal of making the lock acquisition sequence more robust.

We minimized hardware changes by using the 199MHz demodulation board, changing the local oscillator to 99.586317 MHz, with an amplitude of +10 dbm (the 3f signals are therefore acquired as LSC-PD6_I and LSC-PD6-Q).

We locked both the PRM and the DRM in a stable way using the REFL31_I and REFL31_Q, after tuning the demodulation phase (50) and removing their offsets.
On the other hand, we weren't able to acquire the lock in the DRM configuration directly by using the 3f signals. We needed instead to use the f signals first, and switch to the 3f signals once the lock was already acquired, otherwise ending up locking DRM at a different working point.
One explanation for that might be the fact that the beam impinging upon the 3f diode is too big compared with the diode size (only 1 mm, half of the size of the f1 diode).
For these reason, in presence of misalignments, some of the reflected light goes in high order modes, which can be partially (or all) off the diode, thereby generating multi-zero crossing in the demodulated error signal.

The next step before making the test with the whole IFO is therefore to modify the telescope in front of the 3f diode in order to reduce the beam size and repeat the tests we did tonight in DRM configuration.

P.S.: We made a test by changing the frequency of the local oscillator by a little bit and then coming back to the original value. We observed that the phase of the signal can change, so every time this frequency is moved the 3f demod phase need to be retuned.

John, Rob, Rana, Lisa

378

Fri Mar 14 12:06:29 2008

GC750 looking at ETMX while locked

The GC750 (CMOS) is currently looking at the front of ETMX. Unfortunately, its being routed through a 10Mbit connection (which I will be purchasing a replacement for today), so getting it to send images to Mafalda/Linux 2 or 3 isn't working well, but by using a local gigabit switch and a laptop I can get sufficient speed for full images with the sample viewer.

The attached image is from a full 752x480 reslution with 10,000 microsecond exposure with the X-arm locked. Although it looks like I still need to work on the focusing. Will be switching the GC750 with the GC 650 (CCD) later today and comparing the resulting images.

379

Fri Mar 14 14:59:51 2008

Comparison between GC650 (CCD) and GC750 (CMOS) looking at ETMX

Attached are images taken of ETMX while locked.

The first two are 300,000 microsecond exposure time, with approximately the same focusing/zoom. (The 750 is slightly more zoomed in than the 650 in these images). The second are 30,000 microsecond exposures. The la

The CMOS appears to be more sensitive to the 1064 nm reflected light (resulting in bright images for the same exposure time). This may make a difference in applications where images are desired to be taken quickly and repeatedly.

Both seem to be resolving individual specks on the optic reasonably well.

Next test is to place both camera on a Gaussian beam (in a couple different modes say 00, 11, and so forth), probably using the PMC.

381

Fri Mar 14 15:52:07 2008

I've edited the LSC code to send different signals to the ASS box. Now, instead of the previously selected error signals deemed to be acceptable for the Alignment Sensing and Stabalization system, it sends the LSC control signals for each suspension to the ASS box (in its new incarnation as the Adaptive Susurration Subtraction system). These are the signals after the output matrix, and also after the LSC-[SUS] filter modules.

383

Sun Mar 16 17:03:32 2008

I've updated the ass.mdl file in the directory:

/cvs/cds/caltech/users/alex/cds/advLigo/src/epics/simLink/

to get us started in the adaptive PEM noise subtraction.

After several iterations of remote help from Alex, the code compiles and runs, receives signals from the LSC, PEM, and MC2, and communicates with the suspension controllers. I've also adapted the .par file from the code generator, but haven't got the testpoints working with the new ASS code. There are no MEDM screens yet, and Matt's adaptive filter code has not been installed (there's a matrix as a placeholder).

Putting in the adaptive code should be simple, building the MEDM screens tedious, and getting the testpoints working uncertain. I noticed that the new testpoint.par file starts at a different channel number than the previous (working) version, which is strange. I probably have a script somewhere to change all these numbers by a constant offset, but I don't know if that's the actual problem--maybe stuff just needs to be rebooted.

The code receives as input the first 24 channels from the PEM ADCU, the eight suspension control signals from the LSC, and the output of the MCL filter from MC2. It outputs to the MCL filter input of each suspension (except MC2).

384

Mon Mar 17 18:30:48 2008

It seems that adaptive filtering can achieve results similar to those of the MISO FIR Wiener (entry 369). The adaptive code simulates real-time operation, but uses the same data used by Rana for the Wiener filter. I ran the adaptive filter over the data 100 times to ensure that it was well trained... maybe too well.

386

Thu Mar 20 16:06:27 2008

I changed the LSC code again. I noticed that when turning off the LSC (e.g., going from LA to OFF), the cpu time would jump from ~50 to ~80, and irrevocably de-sync all the SUS controllers. This was because turning off the LSC would suddenly zero the inputs to the decimation filters that send information to the ASS box, which for some reason greatly increases the computation time of the iir filter function call. I changed the code so that these inputs are never zeroed. The ASS receives inputs from the LSC all the time now.

I also noticed that the ASS machine was running in ~2400 usec. Yes, 2,400 microseconds. I don't know how long it's been doing that, but I restarted it. Immediately after restart, it ran at 1700 microseconds. After using the "RESET" field in the adaptOnline code, that dropped to ~100 usec. Now it's not doing any adaptive filtering, as I don't know what the good settings are and no-one has been elogging their IFO work the last few days.

390

Fri Mar 21 17:01:21 2008

Locale change on Mafalda & seisBLRMS restart

DMF

Ever since we moved the accelerometers to be around the MC and changed their names, the seisBLRMS
has not been working. I tried to restart it today after fixing the channel names in the par file
but I ran into a PERL / UBUNTU bug.

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
        LANGUAGE = (unset),
        LC_ALL = (unset),
        LC_TIME = "en_US.ISO8859-1",
        LC_MONETARY = "en_US.ISO8859-1",
        LC_CTYPE = "en_US.ISO8859-1",
        LC_COLLATE = "en_US.ISO8859-1",
        LC_MESSAGES = "C",
        LC_NUMERIC = "en_US.ISO8859-1",
        LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

I don't know how this crept up or when it started. There were a bunch of fixes on the Ubuntu
forums which didn't work.

In the end I just set the 'unset' environment variables via our cshrc.40m file and this seemed
to make ligotools/perl happy. Lets hope this lasts...I love Linux.

391

Fri Mar 21 23:15:11 2008

Ranger SS-1: New Setup

The Ranger seismometer has been in a bad state. Its output had been sent into a SR560 without any termination.

The seismometer is, internally, just a mass on a flexure with a magnet and a pickup coil for readout.
The damping of the system depends on the resistor hooked up across the coil. With the SR560 this is
the 1 Meg input impedance of it and so the mass is undamped.

I installed a 4300 Ohm resistor in there which seems to nearly critically damp it. However, this will not
allow us to reach the ultimate quantum noise limited performance. We will have to analyze the thermal, voltage,
and current noise to get that.

I then also increased the gain from 10 to 100 on the SR560. This should now make the front end noise of the
seismometer/SR560 close to equal to the noise of the PEM ADC.

392

Fri Mar 21 23:17:47 2008

I updated the seisBLRMS par file with the new channel names of the accelerometers and the seismometer and then
recompiled the code and restarted it according to Rob's elog entry. It went fine and the seisBLRMS is now back in
action.

412

Thu Apr 3 18:46:04 2008

Andrey

"Network switch board" and "c1pem1 crate" were touched

While working with the weather station, I did two things that potentially (with a very small probability) might influence the smooth work of other processors/computers.
I did the following on Wednesday, April 2nd, in times between 1PM and 3PM.

(1) I turned off for several seconds and returned into the initial position the switch-key on the rack with computer (processor) 'c1pem1' in order to reboot processor 'c1pem1'. The turning off/on of that key-switch was repeated several times.

(2) I pulled gently the whole "Network-Switch Board" towards me in order to replace an ethernet cat 5 cable going into the board form the processor 'c1pem1'. Some other connections of other ethernet cables might be flimsy, and then other people in 40-meter might have problems with computers other than 'c1pem1'. It should not happen, but in case of extraordinary behaviour of any other computer in our lab, people should check the connectors on the network-switch board. It is located near the middle of Y-arm. See picture.

418

Tue Apr 8 09:08:54 2008

steve

weather station disconnected

We can not leave cables in the walkways and go on vacation.
I disconnected the weather station from the DAQ
Every Tuesday is janitor day in the 40m.
We have to give him free space for doing a good job.

Burned toast award goes to Andrey.

419

Tue Apr 15 18:44:25 2008

There is a new computer in the control room -- its called Rosalba,
in keeping with our naming convention. Its a quad-core machine that
Dmass found for cheap somewhere; we've installed the CentOS on it
that Alex recommended.

Its a 64-bit Linux and so that's going to cause some problems. Alex has done this
before and so we have some confidence that we can get our regular tools (DTT, Dataviewer)
to run on it.

I have made a new apps tree for all of our future 64-bit Linux machines. So far, there is
a 64-bit firefox and a 64-bit matlab in there. As we start using this machine some more, we
will be forced to install more 64-bit Linux stuff.

We also didn't have enough network cables to run to both linux3 and rosalba. Andrey has decided that we
should not ditch linux3 and so he will run another cable for it tomorrow.

434

Tue Apr 22 08:34:22 2008

Current Network Diagram

The attached network diagram has also been added to the 40m Wiki at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Image_Processing_with_GigE_Cameras

439

Tue Apr 22 22:51:30 2008

I've been working a little on the MC WFS in the last few days. I have made many
changes to the sensing matrix script and also to the MCWFSanalyze.m script.

The output matrix, as it was, was not bad at low frequencies but was making noise in
the ~1 Hz band. Turning the gain way down made it do good things at DC and not make
things work higher.

The output matrix generating script now works after Rob fixed the XYCOM issue. Not sure
what was up there. As Caryn mentioned the SUS2.ini channels were all zero after Andrey's
PEM power cycle a few days ago. Rob booted c1susvme to get the SUS1 channels back and
today we did c1susvme2 to get the IOO-MC_L et. al. back.

Even after doing the matrix inversion there is some bad stuff in the output matrix. I
checked that the sensing matrix measurement has good coherence and I measured and set the
MC WFS RF phases (they were off by ~20-30 deg.). Still no luck.

My best guess now is that the RG filters I've used for POS damping and the movement of the
beam on the MC mirror faces has made a POS<->YAW instability at low frequencies. My next
move is to revert to velocity damping and see if things get better. Should also try redoing
the A2L on the MC1-3.

443

Thu Apr 24 15:57:53 2008

I measured the output power of the psl after the mechanical shutter.

It was 1.1 W with Ophir power meter, than unlocked the MC and measured
the power at the MC-REFL Beam Dump at the AP-ISCT 0.9 W
Power on MC-REFL photodiode 92 mW

High power metal beam shields were installed around the beam path of
MC-REFL between AP-Viewport and MC-REFL Beam Dump.
Placed HIGH POWER LASER BEAM PATH warning signs on table frame and top
covers.

Last week I placed a small monitor on the top of the OOC that
monitors the resonant spot of MC2. Please keep an eye on this monitor
when working on the AP-ISCT

AP table should NOT be left uncovered. One experienced laser operator
has to be present if the top is removed and IR-viewer scan required.
We need your full cooperation to keep this lab safe.

447

Fri Apr 25 11:33:40 2008

Andrey

Computer controlling vaccum equipment

Old computer (located in the south-end end of the interferometer room) that was almost unable to fulfill his duties of controlling vacuum equipment has been replaced to "Linux-3". MEDM runs on "Linux-3".

We checked later that day together with Steve Vass that vacuum equipment (like vacuum valves) can be really controlled from the MEDM-screen 'VacControl.adl'.

Unused flat LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse (parts of the former LINUX-3 computer) were put on the second shelf of the computer rack in the computer room near the HP printer.

451

Fri Apr 25 20:53:02 2008

IOO

MC WFS with more gain

Quick update: we found that the reason for the MC WFS instability was that the digital anti-whitening was one but not the analog whitening.

We turned off the digital filters and were able to increase the gain by a factor of ~30. It is left like this, but if it hampers IFO locking then best to just turn it back down to an overall gain of 0.1 or 0.05.

454

Sun Apr 27 02:11:11 2008

As noted in the elog from Friday, the WFS has been bad ever since someone switched on the digital whitening filters (FM1 & FM2)
in the MC WFS I&Q filter banks.

On Friday evening, John, Alan, and I went to the rack and verified that although the drawing shows a hookup for the whitening
filters, there is actually no such thing and so we can't have the whitening. So the anti-whitening turns on two lag filters
(2 poles at 4 Hz) and without the hardware this makes the servos unstable by adding 90 deg of phase lag at 4 Hz.

There are still several problems in this system:

- AD797 is used after the mixer. This is an unreliable, noisy part. We need to change this out
  with some OP27s so that this becomes reliable and has a more reasonable noise figure.

- Hard wire the whitening filters ON. We never want these to be off. Then we can turn on the
  anti-whitening. This will give us a factor of 100 better noise without filtering.

- The AD602 on the front of the whitening board has a 100 Ohm internal impedance and the 
  resistor between the demod board and the AD602 is 909 Ohms. This results in dividing the
  signal by 10.

- The signal at the ADC is ~100 cts peak-peak. The full ADC range is, of course, 65000 cts. So
  we could use a lot more gain. The mean quadrant signals are also ~100 cts so we could easily
  up the analog DC gain by a factor of 30 on top of the whitening filter increase.

- The AD602 at the input and the AD620 on the output are both variable gain stages but because
  of our lack of control are set to ambiguous gain levels. We should set the AD602 on the input
  to its max gain of 30 dB. With the -20 dB from the x10 voltage division, this will give us
  an overall gain of 3 for the puny demod signals.

455

Sun Apr 27 05:09:30 2008

MC WFS Whitening turned on

IOO

I hardwired on the MC WFS whitening filters.

The MAX333A switches which choose between whitening and bypass on that board were in the bypass position
because the Xycom220 connections are not there. So the control switch gets +15V but there is no pull
down to set it to the whitened mode.

The least invasive (easiest) change I could do was to tie all of those inputs to ground. This pulls a few mA
through the pull-down resistors but is otherwise innocuous. All of these control lines come in on the A-row
of the P1 connector, so I was able to solder a single wire across all of them to ground them all.

The WFS2 board had a blown electrolytic capacitor on the -15 V line and so there was probably some extra noise
getting in that way. I couldn't find any extra SMD to replace it so I cut the legs off of a 22 uF polarized
tantalum and stuck it in there. Its even close to being the same color. I checked out the other caps, and they were all
close to 68 uF as spec'd. This one had luckily blown open and so didn't suck down the Sorensen and destroy everything.

Plugged everything back in switched the WFS servos back on. Looks good. Took before and after spectra.

In the plot:

GREEN: Open loop dark noise before changes
RED: Open loop bright (MC locked but MCWFS off)
BLUE: Closed loop, MC locked

BLACK: Dark noise after whitening
ORANGE:Closed loop after whitening

The cursor is at 16.25 Hz, the SOS bounce mode.

The I ran the new setMCWFSgains script which uses pzgain to set the UGFs of the 4 loops to 4.01 Hz.
We have in the past had problems with high WFS gains causing instabilities with the CM servo around 10-30 Hz. If this happens we should
just lower the gain by a factor of ~5.

463

Thu May 1 12:46:02 2008

The computer Nodus is now acting as a gateway machine between the GC network and the martian network in the 40m. It has the same passwords as the rana gateway machine.

Its name on the GC side is nodus (ip: 131.215.115.52) and on the martian side is nodus113 (ip: 131.215.113.200). Will need to update the hosts file on the control room machines so you can just use the name nodus113 rather than the full ip.

Software is still being added to the computer, and it will remain in parallel with the rana gateway machine until everything has been working properly for a week or so.

466

Tue May 6 17:28:39 2008

I am in the process of switching the POX166 and AP33 photodetectors, so that they become POX33 and AP166. The IFO_CONFIGURE buttons won't work until I finish.

467

Wed May 7 15:25:41 2008

Quote:

I am in the process of switching the POX166 and AP33 photodetectors, so that they become POX33 and AP166. The IFO_CONFIGURE buttons won't work until I finish.

Done. We're now in the 40m CDD configuration.

471

Thu May 8 16:40:36 2008

Gige Camera currently on PSL table

Andrey and myself were working on the PSL table today, using a pickoff of a pickoff of the main beam (adding a microscope slide to pickoff ~4% of the original pickoff) to the GC750 GigeCam.

At the time we left, we scanned the area with a beam scan and didn't see any new stray beams, and nothing in any useful beam paths should have changed. We also strung a Cat 6 cable from the control room switch out to the PSL table in the cable trays, and then above the PSL table.

Currently, its not as well aligned as it could be, and also requires a very low exposure setting, of -E 50 or so to avoid saturation.

479

Thu May 15 12:05:49 2008

PSL

Path to PSL Position QPD

The 50/50 beamsplitter that was being used as the last turning mirror to the PSL Position QPD has been replaced with a Y1-1037-45-S plate. This turning mirror was also moved 4" farther along the beam path, so as to produce as small (few microwatts) transmission through the plate. The lensing optics were also shifted so as to maintain a focused beam on the photodiode. Lastly, the rotating ND filter was increased from 1.5 to 2.0 to reduce the incident power on the photodiode, since twice the power is now reaching it.

The small beam on transmission will be used by the digital cameras as a test beam.

486

Sun May 18 18:59:15 2008

I added rosalba to the hosts file for the control room machines (131.215.113.103).

I also removed the updateddb cron from our op440m crontab because it was running at 5 PM
even though I had set it to run at 5:57 AM. If it still runs then, it must be because of
another crontab.

489

Tue May 20 18:33:01 2008

Andrey, John

Mode Cleaner is locked again

IOO

It was noticed by Mr.Adhikari earlier today that the MC became unlocked at about 11AM.

There is no clear understanding what caused the problem.

Trying to restore the modecleaner locking, we noticed with John that the beam was not centered on the wavesensors (WFS1. WFS2 on the screen "C1IOO_LockMC.adl"). We decided to adjust the beam position moving slightly the bias sliders for pitch and yaw degrees of freedom for MC1.
This allowed to make the MC locked.

Old positions for the MC1 sliders: Pitch = 2.9934, Yaw = -0.6168;
New positions --------//---------: Pitch = 3.0604, Yaw = -0.7258.

At the same time, FSS for PSL is still showing the values in the range 0.720 - 0.750 which is lower than the usual values. The indicator for FSS value is yellow when it is below 0.750.

492

Thu May 22 11:25:19 2008

One of the new Netgear Prosafe 24 port switches was mounted in the 1X4 rack,, roughly in the middle, away from the top and bottom rack mounted electronics. At the moment, its IP has been set to 131.215.113.250, gateway 131.215.113.2 (which is what I saw as the only listed gateway on linux1 using route -n) and mask 255.255.255.0.

I'm planning to set the next three IP address for the switches as *.251, *.252 and *.253, which don't look to have been used yet.

495

Sun May 25 16:20:27 2008

I have installed joinPDF 2.1 on rosalba. Since its written in Java, I didn't have to tinker with it at all to work on a 64-bit machine. Now Caryn can put all of her plots into 1 file.

498

Sun May 25 21:14:14 2008

I set up an EPICS gateway server on Nodus so that we can look at 40m MEDM screens from off-site.
The gateway is set up to allow read access to all channels and write access to none of them.

The executable is /cvs/cds/epics/extensions/gateway; it was already installed. A script to start
up the gateway is in target/epics-gateway. For the time being, I haven't set it up to start itself
on boot or anything like that.

To make it work, you have to set the environment variable EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST to the IP address of
Nodus. For instance, something like this should work:

setenv EPICS_CA_ADDR_LIST 131.215.115.52

On Windows you can set up environment variables in the "System" Control Panel. On one of the tabs
there's a button that lets you set up environment variables that will be visible to all programs.

On Andrey's machine I installed the Windows EPICS extensions, i.e. MEDM and its friends. I also
installed the cool Tortoise SVN client which lets you interact with SVN repositories through
the windows explorer shell. (The right-click menu now contains SVN options.) I checked out
the MEDM directory from the 40m SVN onto the desktop. You should be able to just right-click in
that window and choose "SVN Update" to get all the newest screens that have been contributed to
SVN; however, there are currently some problems with the 40m SVN that make that not go smoothly.

At the moment on Andrey's (Windows) machine you can go into the MEDM folder and double-click on
any screen and it will just work, with the exception that not all the screens are installed
due to SVN difficulties.

500

Tue May 27 16:24:54 2008

tobin

Computer Scripts / Programs

ndsproxy

The NDS Proxy is a program that accepts NDS (LIGO Network Data Server) connections from the internet and relays them to
our internal frame-builder, so that you can get DAQ and test-point channel data from off-site.

I stopped the ndsproxy that was running on rana and started it on nodus, its new home. This will be
documented in the wiki.

So far I haven't found a mechanism by which the ndsproxy was restarted automatically on rana. Has it just been
restarted by hand?

The ndsproxy stuff lives in target/ndsproxy. Restarting it seems to be just a matter of running "start_ndsproxy" in
that directory.

501

Wed May 28 12:51:32 2008

Two more switches mounted

Two more Prosafe 24 port switches have been mounted in the racks, one in 1Y9 and one in 1Y6. (The first one was placed in 1X4).

The one in 1Y9 has been set to an IP address of 131.215.113.251, while the one in 1Y6 is set to 131.215.113.252, and these have been labeled as such.

506

Fri May 30 12:03:08 2008

josephb, Andrey

Head to head comparison of cameras

Andrey and myself - Joseph B. - have examined the output of the GC650 (CCD) and GC750 (CMOS) prosilica cameras. We did several live motion tests (i.e. rotate the turning mirror, move and rotate the camera, etc) and also used a microscope slide to try to eliminate back reflections and interference.

Both the GC650 and GC750 produce dark lines in the images, some of which look parallel, while others are in much stranger shapes, such as circles and arcs.

Moving the GC750 camera physically, we have the spot moving around, with the dark lines appearing to be fixed to the camera itself, and remain in the same location on the detector. I.e. coming back to the same spot keeps showing a circle. In reasonably well behaved sections, these lines are about 10% dips in power, and could in principle be subtracted out. Its possible that the camera was damaged with too much light incident in the past, although going back to the pmc_trans images that were taken, similar lines are still visible.

Moving the GC650 camera physically seems to change the position of the lines (if one also rotates the turning mirror to get to the same spot on the CCD). It seems as if a slight change in angle has a large effect on these dark bands, which can either be thin, or very large, bordering on the size of the spot size. My guess is (as the vendor suggested) the light is interacting with the electronics behind the surface layer rather than a surface defect producing these lines. Using a microscope slide in between the turning mirror and the GC650, we were able to produce new fringes, but didn't affect the underlying ones.

Placing a microscope slide in between the last turning mirror and the GC750 does not affect the dark lines (although it does seem to add some), nor does turning the final turning mirror, so it seems unlikely to be caused by back reflection in this case.

So it seems the CMOS may be more consistent, although we need to determine if the current line problems are due to exposure to too much light at some point in the past (i.e. I broke it) or they come that way from the factory.

Attached are the results of image-processing of the images from the two our cameras using Andrey's new Matlab script.

508

Fri May 30 21:30:15 2008

I installed svn on op440m.  This involved installing the following packages from sunfreeware:

apache-2.2.6-sol9-sparc-local  libiconv-1.11-sol9-sparc-local   subversion-1.4.5-sol9-sparc-local
db-4.2.52.NC-sol9-sparc-local  libxml2-2.6.31-sol9-sparc-local  swig-1.3.29-sol9-sparc-local
expat-2.0.1-sol9-sparc-local   neon-0.25.5-sol9-sparc-local     zlib-1.2.3-sol9-sparc-local
gdbm-1.8.3-sol9-sparc-local    openssl-0.9.8g-sol9-sparc-local

The packages are located in /cvs/cds/caltech/apps/solaris/packages.  The command line to install
a package is "pkgadd -d " followed by the package name.  This can be repeated on nodus to get
svn over there.  (Kind of egregious to require an apache installation for the svn _client_, I 
know.)

509

Sun Jun 1 19:25:10 2008

new monitor on op440m

I installed the new 24" flat screen on op440m. I increased the screen resolution from 1280x1024 to 1900x1200 using
the obscure 'fbconfig' command. You can type Google it if you want.

The old monitor is on the surplus cart. If you are reading this and think you might walk from the 40 over to
Bridge, please wheel the cart full of old computer equipment (on the north side of the control room) over to Larry.

I also copied over all the images on the D40 to a folder on Kirk's computer and deleted the originals.

Dan Busby also visited us last week to help us move the drill press from the Y arm down into the sub basement
of W Bridge.

510

Sun Jun 1 19:39:35 2008

Phil Ehrens gave me a DVD of the 40m elog, apache, and (Jamie's) SVN archive.
I copied it to nodus:/home/controls/dvd-from-ehrens.  Once we get the elog
running on nodus, we can copy the datafile over again from dziban (so that
we don't lose any elog entries) and switch over.

513

Tue Jun 3 10:19:45 2008

Several of us transported the big new awesome Sun box from Bridge over to
the 40m last week. If I recall correctly, it's a SunFire X4600 with
something like sixteen 64-bit AMD processor cores at 2.8 GHz. It sounds
like a jet engine when it starts up (before the cooling fans are throttled
back) and has four power supplies (each with its own connection
to the wall). It has slick removable hard disks and fan units too. Our
working name for it is "megatron".

Anyway. It came with two hard disks, one with Solaris 10 installed. I took
the other hard disk over to Alex, who copied a Realtime Linux installation
onto it. Alex says it boots and runs fine.

It remains for you guys to install the machine onto rails and install the
whole thing into a rack. Before it goes into service as a realtime control
machine, you might as well install Matlab on it and do some heavy-duty
computation.

514

Tue Jun 3 10:40:27 2008

Alex let me know the secret location of the latest dataviewer executable for Linux. It is:

http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/~aivanov/upload/dv/Control/dc3

If your linux dataviewer on linux2 has the "year field not filled in" bug, you should download this into /usr/local/bin/dc3 (after making a backup of that file).

It looks like there's no dataviewer installed on rosalba yet. We should figure out a better directory layout for the linux machines; currently dataviewer is installed locally on linux2. It should be in /cvs/cds/caltech/apps/linux/something so that all the linux machines see the same installation.

517

Wed Jun 4 13:46:42 2008

Changing incident angle images

Attached are images from the GC650 and GC750 when the incident angle was varied from 0 tilt (normal incidence) to 5,10, and 20 degrees. Each time the beam was realigned via the last turning mirror to be on roughly the same spot. This light was a pickoff of the PSL table light just before it leaves the table.

Images include the raw data, fit to the data, residual normalized by peak power "w(1)", and normalized by the individual bin power.

The first pdf includes 0 degrees (normal) and ~5 degrees of tilt for the GC650 (CCD) camera.

The second pdf includes ~10 and ~20 degrees of tilt images for the GC650 (CCD) camera.

The third pdf includes 0 and ~5 degrees of tilt for the GC750 (CMOS) camera.

The fourth pdf includes ~10 and ~20 degrees of tilt for the GC750 (CMOS) camera.

Things to note:
1) GC750 camera seems to have a structure on the camera itself, somewhat circular in nature. One possible explanation is the camera was damage at a previous juncture due to too much light. Need to check earlier images for this problem.
2) GC650 has "bands" which change direction and thickness with angle. Also at higher incidence angle, the sensitivity seems to drop (unlike the GC750 where overall power level seems to stay constant with increasing angle of incidence).
3) GC650 seems to have a higher noise floor,seen from the last plot of each pdf (where each pixel of the residual is normalized by the power in the corresponding pixel of the fit).

519

Wed Jun 4 16:57:12 2008

Dark images from cameras (electronics noise measurement)

The attached pdfs are 1 second and 1 millisecond long integrations from the GC650 and GC750 cameras with a cap in place - i.e. no light.

They include the mean and standard deviation values.

The single bright pixel in the 1 second long exposure image for the GC650 seems to be a real effect. Multiple images taken show the same bright pixel (although with slightly varying amplitudes).

The last pdf is a zoom in on the z-axis of the first pdf (i.e. GC650 /w 1 sec exposure time).

I'm not really sure what to make of the mean remaining virtually fixed for the different integration times for both cameras. I guess 0 is simply offset, but doesn't result in any runaway integrations in general. Although there are certainly some stronger pixels in the long exposures when compared to the short exposures.

Its interesting to note the standard deviation actually drops from the long exposure to the short exposure, possibly influenced by certain pixels which seem to grow with time.

The one with the least variation from its "zero" was the 1 millisecond GC750 dark image.

520

Thu Jun 5 10:46:26 2008

Approximately uniform reflected white light

In an attempt to investigate the structures seen in previous images for the GC750, I aimed it at a relatively clean section of gray table top roughly a cm or two from the surface and took images (without a lens). As I was holding this with my hand, the angle wasn't completely even with the table, and thus there's a gradient of light in the pictures. However, one should in principle be able to pick out features (such as a circular spot with less sensitivity), but these do not show up.

In my mind, these images seem to indicate the electronics are fine, and suggest that the CMOS or CCD detectors themselves are undamaged (at least in regards to white light, as opposed to 1064nm). An issue with the plastic cap (protective piece) may be the culprit, or perhaps a tiny bit of dust, which the incoherent light from all angles goes around efficiently?

Will try blowing the cameras with clean nitrogen today and see if that removes or changes the circular structure we have seen.

521

Thu Jun 5 13:35:23 2008