We found that one OP-amp used in ISS servo oscillated in 10 MHz, 100mV.

Moreover, we found another OP-amp had big noise.

We guess that these oscilation or noise cause saturation in high frequency, and they effect to lower frequency to cause 

 Attached files are open loop transfar function of ISS.

The blue points are open loop TF, and the green line is product of TF of ISS servo filter and TF of current shunt TF of servo filter.

This two must be same in principle, but They have difference f<2Hz and f>5kHz.

Today, I worked with Kakeru on ISS.

The problem is sort of elusive. Some time, the laser power looks fine, but after a while you may see many sharp drops in the power. Some times, the power drops happen so often that they look almost like an oscillation.

We made several measurements today and Kakeru is now putting the data together. Meanwhile, I will put my speculations on the ISS problem here.

The other day, Kakeru took the transfer function of the ISS feedback filter (he is supposed to post it soon). The filter shape itself has a large phase margin ( more than 50deg ?) at the lower UGF (~3Hz) if we assume the response of the current shunt to be flat. However, when we took the whole open loop transfer function of the ISS loop, the phase margin was only 20deg. This leads to the amplification of the intensity noise around the UGF. The attached plot is the spectrum of the ISS monitor PD. You can see a broad peak around 2.7Hz. In time series, this amplified intensity noise looks like semi-oscillation around this frequency.

Since it is very unlikely that the PD has a large phase advance at low frequencies, the additional phase advance has to be in the current shunt. We measured the response of the current shunt (see Kakeru's coming post). It had a slight high-pass shape below 100Hz (a few dB/dec). This high-pass response produces additional phase advance in the loop.

There seems to be no element to produce such a high-pass response in the current shunt circuit ( http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/D/D040542-A1.pdf )

This Jamie's document shows a similar high-pass response of the current ( http://www.ligo.caltech.edu/docs/G/G030476-00.pdf  page 7 )

Now the question is what causes this high-pass response. Here is my very fishy hypothesis :-)

The PA output depends not only on the pump diode current but also on the mode matching with the NPRO beam, which can be changed by the thermal lensing. If the thermal lensing is in such a condition that an increase in the temperature would reduce the mode matching, then the temperature increase associated with a pump current increase could cancel the power increase. This thermal effect would be bigger at lower frequencies. Therefore, the intensity modulation efficiency decreases at lower frequencies (high-pass behavior). If this model is true, this could explain the elusiveness of the problem, as the cancellation amount depends on the operation point of the PA. 

To test this hypothesis, we can change the pump current level to see if the current shunt response changes. However, the PA current slider on the MEDM screen does not work (Rob told me it's been like this for a while). Also the front panel of the MOPA power supply does not work (Steve told me it's been like this for a while). We tried to connect to the MOPA power supply from a PC through RS-232C port, which did not work neither. We will try to fix the MEDM slider tomorrow.

I attach the transfar function of the current shunt.
There is a little gap at 10 Hz for phase, but it is a ploblem of measurement and not real one.
 

I attache the transfar function of ISS servo.

The 4th stage and variable gain amplifier has alomost same transfar function, so their lines pile up.

I measured the output noise of eache stage of ISS servo, and calcurated the noise ratio between input and 
output of each stage.
Generaly, each noise ratio corresponds to their transfar function. This means servo filter works well, not 
adding extra noise.

I attache example of them.
For 2nd stage, the noise ratio is smaller than transfar function with a few factor. This is because the 
input noise is coverd by analyser's noise and ratio between output and input looks small.
This means the input noise of 2nd stage was enough small and all stage before 2nd stage work well

I fixed the broken slider to change the current of the PA.

The problem was that the EPICS database assigned a wrong channel of the DAC to the slider.

I found that the PA current adjustment signal lines are connected to the CH3 &CH4 of VMIC4116 #1. However in the database file (/cvs/cds/caltech/target/c1psl/psl.db), the slider channel (C1:PSL-126MOPA_DCAMP) was assigned to CH2. I fixed the database file and rebooted c1psl. Then the PA current started to follow the slider value.

I moved the slider back and forth by +/-0.3V while the ISS loop was on. I observed that the amount of the low frequency fluctuation of the MOPA power changed with the slider position. At some current levels, the ISS instability problem went away.

Kakeru is now taking open-loop TFs and current shunt responses at different slider settings.

Yoichi and me found that the transfar function of the current shunt changed with the current of PA.
We changed PA current and fixed the unstability of ISS.
Now, laser power is stabilized finely, with band of about 1 Hz.
Yoich will post the stabilized noise spectrum.

There looks to be some non-linear relation between PA current and  the TF of current shunt.
It had changed from the TF which we measured yesterday, so it might change again.

I try to write scripts to sweep PA current and measure the laser power and its rms automatically.
It will be apply for auto-adjustment of PA current.

Attached files are the transfar function of the current shunt with changing PA.
They have difference in lower frequency.

I added a PA current limiter.
It is only a voltage devider (composed with 3.09k and 1.02k resiste) between DAC and PA current adjustment input.
The output range of DAC is +/- 10[V] and  the conversion factor of PA current adjustment is 0.84[A/V] (measured value), so the PA current adjustment is limited +/- 2.1[A] ( 10[V]*1.02k/(1.02k+3.09k)*0.84[A/V] ).

Actually, the manual of the PA tells that the conversion factor is 0.25[A/V].
There is 3 possibility.
1) There are some mistakes in channels of digital system.
2) The PA manual is wrong.
  2-1) The conversion factor of current adjustment is wrong.
  2-2) The conversion factor of current monitor is wrong.
I measured the signal of current adjustment and current monitor directly, and confirm that they are consistent to the value monitord from MEDM.
Hence the PA manual must be wrong, but I don't know which factor is wrong (or both?).
If the suspect 2-2) is guilty, it means we adjust PA current with very small range.
This is a completly safety way, but a wast of resource.

Now, the slider to control current adjustment indicate the output of DAC.
I will improve this to indicate  current adjustment input, but it takes some time for me to learn about EPICS.

I made the following change to correct the sign of the 126MON channel:

allegra:c1aux>ezcawrite C1:PSL-126MOPA_126MON.EGUF -410
C1:PSL-126MOPA_126MON.EGUF = -410
allegra:c1aux>ezcawrite C1:PSL-126MOPA_126MON.EGUL 410
C1:PSL-126MOPA_126MON.EGUL = 410
allegra:c1aux>

New flipping mirror installed on the AP table on the beam path to the REFL199 PD.

If you're missing the double demod signal, please check that it is actually down.

[Rob, Jenne]

I noticed that the ISS Mean Value and CS Saturation were both RED and unhappy. (The alarms were going off, and they were both red on the MEDM screen).  None of the MEDM settings seemed off kilter, so we went out to take a look at the PSL table. 

Rob checked that light is indeed going to both of the ISS photodiodes (Morag and Siobhan).  Next we checked that all the cables were good, and that the power to the ISS box was plugged in. In this process, Rob wiggled all the cables to check that they were plugged in.  Just after doing this, the Mean Value and CS Sat were happy again.  Rob thinks the current shunt connection might be bad, but we don't really know which one it was since all of the cables were jiggled between our checking the screens. 

Right now, everything is happy again, but as with all bad-cabling-problems, we'll probably see this one again.

I don't know why in particular the connection decided to spaz out this afternoon...I don't think anyone opened the PSL table before Rob and I went to investigate.  I was working on the PMC servo (checking the LO levels...to be posted in a couple minutes), but didn't have anything to do with the ISS. After I was done, I put everything back, and locked the PMC and the MC, and everything was good, until some time later when the ISS started flipping out.

I have calibrated the PMC LO Mon (C1:PSL-PMC_LODET) on the PMC's EPICS screen, by inputting different RF LO levels into the LO input of the PMC servo board.

Since the RF output adjust slider on the PMC's Phase Shifter screen doesn't do a whole lot (see elog 1471), I used a combination of attenuators and the slider to achieve different LO levels. I measured the level of the attenuated RF out of the LO board using the 4395A in spectrum analyzer mode, with the units in dBm, with 50dB attenuation to make it stop complaining about being overloaded.  For each row in the table I measured the RF level using the 4395, then plugged the cable back into the PMC servo board to get the EPICS screen's reading.

The last 2 columns of the table below are the 'settings' I used to get the given RF LO level. 

When the new mixers that Steve ordered come in (tomorrow hopefully), I'll put in a Level 13 mixer in place of the current Level 23 mixer that we have.  Also, Rana suggested increasing the gain on the op-amp which is read out as the LO Mon so that 13dBm looks like 1V.  To do this, it looks like I'll need to increase the gain by ~80.  

Following the method in Peter's Elog, 

I edited c1psl.db to include the following: 


grecord(calc, "C1:PSL-PMC_LOCALC")
{
        field(INPB,"C1:PSL-PMC_LODET")
        field(SCAN,".1 second")
        field(PREC,"4")
        field(CALC,".955*LOGE(B)-17.11")
}

I restarted c1psl (had to go hit the physical reset button since it didn't come back after telnet-ing and "reboot"ing) to make this take effect.

Next step is to tell the PMC screen to look at this _LOCALC rather than _LODET, and the screen will be calibrated into dBm. 

Right now, the screen is as it always has been, because after relooking at the calibration, I no longer believe it.  This calibration claimes -19dBm for an LOmon value of 0.1200, when I actually measured +16dBm for this LOmon value.  So I've screwed something up in doing my MatLAB calibration.  I'll fix it tomorrow, and put in the correct calibration before I change the PMC screen.

RefCav, PMC, MC are all back and locked after my shenanigans. 

I edited c1psl.db to include the following: 


grecord(calc, "C1:PSL-PMC_LOCALC")
{
        field(INPB,"C1:PSL-PMC_LODET")
        field(SCAN,".1 second")
        field(PREC,"4")
        field(CALC,".955*LOGE(B)-17.11")
}

 As it turns out, I apparently can't tell X from Y when fitting a function in a rush.  The real calibration stuff which is now in c1psl.db is:

grecord(calc, "C1:PSL-PMC_LOCALC")
{
        field(INPB,"C1:PSL-PMC_LODET")
        field(SCAN,".1 second")
        field(PREC,"4")
        field(CALC,"1.004*LOGE(B)+17.76")
}

I restarted c1psl (again, had to go hit the physical reset button since it didn't come back after a telnet-reboot) to have it take in the changes.  The psl.db file that was in place before yesterday (before I touched it) is saved as psl.db.15Apr2009 just in case.

I edited the PMC EPICS screen to have the LO mon look at C1:PSL-PMC_LOCALC, which is the calibrated channel in dBm.  I also stuck a little label on the screen saying what units it's in, because everyone likes to know what units they're looking at.

The new Level 13 mixer on the PMC servo board is installed (minicircuits SRA-3MH).   Since the RF output of the LO board was ~16dBm, I put a 3dB attenuator between the LO board and the LO input on the servo board.  Since the previous cable was *just* the right length, this required adding a tiny bit of cable.  I found a very short cable, which worked out nicely, and didin't leave bunches of extra cable between the two boards.  One of these days if I have time (i.e. if it is necessary), I'll make a new cable for this purpose, so that we don't have 2 cables daisy-chained. 

A note on the Mixer-replacement:  The mixer on the PMC servo board is soldered in a set of 8 through-holes, not stuck in a socket.  So I had to desolder the old Level 23 Mixer (minicircuits RAY-3) which was a total pain.  Unfortunately, in this process, I lifted one of the pads off the back side of the board.  Once the old mixer was removed, it became clear that the pin for the pad I had lifted was shorted via a trace on the front side of the board to the pin directly across from it.  So when installing the new mixer, I did my best to get some solder into the through-hole for the lifted-pad-pin, and then tied it using a jumper wire to the pin that it's shorted to on the front of the board.  You can't see the trace that shorts the two pins because it's underneath the mixer, when the mixer is installed.  (Sidenote: after talking with Rana, this should be okie-dokie, especially if these are ground pins).

The PMC and MC locked nice and happily after I replaced the board and turned all the HV supplies back on, so I call this a success!

I also measured the OLG of the PMC servo after today's adventures in mixer-land.  I get a UGF of 1.4kHz, with 66 degrees of phase margin.  The method for this is in elog 924.

I checked the phase slider setting of the PMC phase screen by putting 30kHz at 100mV into the Ext DC input of the servo board, and looking at the 30kHz peak output of the Mixer Out.  I fiddled with the phase slider, and chose the value for which the 30kHz peak was maximized.  The phase slider is now set to 5.0V. 

The MOPA is taking the long weekend off.

Steve went out to wipe off the condensation inside the MOPA and found beads of water inside the NPRO box, perilously close to the PCB board.  He then measured the water temperature at the chiller head, which is 6C.  We decided to "reboot" the MOPA/chiller combo, on the off chance that would get things synced up.  Upon turning off the MOPA, the neslab chiller display immediately started displaying the correct temperature--about 6C.  The 22C number must come from the MOPA controller.  We thus tentatively narrowed down the possible space of problems to: broken MOPA controller and/or clog in the cooling line going to the power amplifier.  We decided to leave the MOPA off for the weekend, and start plumbing on Tuesday.  It is of course possible that the controller is the problem, but we think leaving the laser off over the weekend is the best course of action.

steve, rob, alberto

Steve installed two rotary flow meters into the MOPA chiller system--one at the chiller flow output and one in the NPRO cooling line.  After some hijinks, we discovered that the long, insulated chiller lines have the same labels at each end.  This means that if you match up the labels at the chiller end, at the MOPA end you need switch labels: out goes to in and vice-versa.  This means that, indubitably, we have at some point had the flow going backwards through the MOPA, though I'm not sure if that would make much of a difference. 

Steve also installed a new needle valve in the NPRO cooling line, which works as expected as confirmed by the flow meter. 

We also re-discovered that the 40m procedures manual contains an error.  To turn on the chiller in the MOPA start-up process, you have to press ON, then RS-232, then ENTER.  The proc man says ON, RS-232, RUN/STOP.

The laser power is at 1.5W and climbing.

 Rob, Alberto

The chiller HT alarm started blinking, as the water temperature had reached 40 degrees C, and was still rising.  We turned off the MOPA and the chiller.  Maybe we need to open the needle valve a bit more?  Or maybe the flow needs to be reversed?  The labels on the MOPA are backwards?

 The chiller appears to be broken.  We currently have it on, with both the SENSOR and RS-232 unplugged.  It's running, circulating water, and the COOL led is illuminated.  But the temperature is not going down.  The exhaust out the back is not particularly warm.  We think this means the refrigeration unit has broken, or the chiller computer is not communicating with the refrigerator/heat exchanger.  Regardless, we may need a new chiller and a new laser.

steve, alberto, rob

After some futzing around with the chiller, we have come to the tentative conclusion that the refrigeration unit is not working.  Steve called facilities to try to get them to recharge the refrigerant (R-404a) tomorrow, and we're also calling around for a spare chiller somewhere in the project (without luck so far).

 The repair man thinks it's a bad start capacitor, which is 240uF at 120V.  Steve has ordered a new one which should be here tomorrow, and with luck we'll have lasing by tomorrow afternoon.

I drained the water and removed side covers from the Neslab RTE 140 refrigerated water cooler unit this morning. The hoses to the laser were disconnected.

This abled you to see the little window of refregerant  R404A was free of bubles, meaning: no recharge was needed.

The circulator bath was refilled with 7 liters of Arrowhead distilled water and the unit was turned on.

The water temp was kept 20.00+- .05C without any load. Finally the AC-repair man Paul showed up.

He measured the R404A level to be as specified: 23-24 PSI on the suction side and 310 PSI on the discharge side.

The unit was working fine. Paul found an intermittently functioning starting capacitor on the compressor  that was removed.

The 240 micro Farad 120VAC cap will arrive tomorrow

Steve, Rob and Alberto

Starting capacitor 216 miroFarad was installed on the compressor. Water lines were connected to the MOPA as corrected, so the flow meter readings are logical.

Now IN means flowing water in the direction of black arrow on the hose.

We struggled with the Neslab presetting:  temp, bauds rate  and other  unknowns  till Rob found the M6000 manual on Peter king's website.

Alberto realized that the chiller temp had to be reset to 20C on water chiller.

I put 1mg of Chloramin T into the water to restrict the growth of algae in the bath.

The NPRO heat sink  was around ~20C without flow meter wheel rotation  and the PA body ~25C by touch of a finger

I just opened up the needle valve a litle bit so the flow meter wheel would started rotating slowly.

That small glitch at the end of this 3 hrs plot shows this adjustment.

I'm setting SLOWDC to about -5.

I had to edit FSSSlowServo because it had hard limits on SLOWDC at (-5 and 5).  It now goes from -10 to 10.

I locked to PSL loops, then tweaked the alignment of the MC to get it to lock. 

I first steering MC1 until all the McWFS quads were saturated.  This got the MC locking in a 01 mode.  So I steered MC1 a little more till it was 00.  Then I steered MC2 to increase the power a little bit.  After that, I just enabled the MC autolocker.

The laser power seems to have become more stable after fixing the laser chiller. The power is lower than it used to be (MOPA amplitude 2.5 versus 2.7) but, as shown in the attchement, it became more steady.

Some thoughts on what happened with the MOPA cooling. 

Some unknown thing happened to precipitate the initial needle valve jiggle, which unleashed a torrent of flow through the NPRO.  This flow was made possible by the fact that the cooling lines are labeled confusingly, and so flow was going backwards through the needle valve, which was thus powerless to restrict it.  The NPRO got extremely cold, and most of the chiller's cooling power was being used to unnecessarily cool the NPRO.  So, the PA was not getting cooled enough.  At this, point, reversing the flow probably would have solved everything.  Instead, we turned off the chiller and thus discovered the flaky start-motor capacitor. 

Now we have much more information, flow meters in the NPRO and main cooling lines, a brand-new, functioning needle valve, a better understanding of the chiller/MOPA settings necessary for operation, and the knowledge of what happens when you install a needle valve backwards.

The Neslab chiller is working well. It's temp display shows 20.0 C rock solid. Flow meter rotating at 13.5Hz at the out put of the chiller.

The MOPA temp was measured with a hand held thermocouple . The  PA was  34 C and 29 C at NPRO heat sink.

The NPRO flow meter was not rotating at this time. There was just trickeling water flow though the meter.

I closed the needle valve this point. It needed 8 turns clockwise. This drives head temp to 19.9 C

Than I opened the needle valve 9 turns and the flow meter wheel was  rotaing at ~ 1 Hz

We gained a little power. Can you explain this?

The PMC alarm was on this morning. It was relocked at lower HV

The FSS_RMTEMP jumped 0.5 C so The PZT was compensating for it.

Today I tuned the periscope on the PSL table to align the beam to the Mode Cleaner. With the Wave Front Sensor control off, I minimized the reflection from the MC and maximized the transmission. While doing that I also checked that the transmitted beam after the MC didn't lose the alignment with the interferometer's main Faraday isolator.

In this way, I've got a reflection, as read from the MC_REFLPD_MC, of about 0.6. Then I centered the WFS on the AS table. After that the WFS alignment control brought the reflection to 0.25 and a nice centered bull-eye spot showed on the monitor.

Trying to track the MC positions back for a few days, it seems that the data hasn't been recorded properly for a while. Something happened yesterday after my boot fest and then the record got restored. Attached here are the readbacks showing the event for MC1.

Is anything wrong with the data record?

Alberto, Koji,

Summary of the latest adventures with the alignment of the mode cleaner

Prior events.

• Last week, on July 12th the RFM network crashed (elog entry 1736). I don't know for sure which one was the cause and which one the effect, but also C1DAQADW was down and it didn't want to restart. Alex fixed it the day after.

• On the evening of Sunday July 20th I noticed that the mode cleaner was unlocked. A closer inspection showed me that MCL was frozen at -32768 counts. To fix that I rebooted C1DCUEPICS and burtrestored to snapshots from the day before.

• On Tuesday July 21st another failure of the RFM Network made necessary a reboot of the frame builder and of all front end computers (entry 1772). As a consequence, the mode cleaner couldn't get locked anymore, even if the mirror's sliders in the MC-Align MEDM screen were in the proper positions. At that time I missed to check the MC suspension positions as a way to ensure that the MC hadn't really changed. Although later, as it turned out, that would have been useless anyway since all the data record prior to the computers crash of that day somehow had been corrupted (entry 1774). Neither the MC2 LSC control or MC ASC control could engage so I (erroneously) thought that some tune of the periscope might help. So I did but, since the Mode Cleaner was misaligned, that had the effect of spoiling the good matching of the periscope to the MC cavity.

• Yesterday, Wednesday July 22nd, I found out about the sticky slider effect (entry 1776). At that point we didn't have anymore a way to know that the MC optics were actually in their proper original alignment state because of the lack of a reference for those in the data record (as I wrote above). I had to go back to the periscope and fix the alignment.

Chronicles of periscope and MC alignment

Yesterday morning I started aligning the periscope but it turned out to be trickier than usual. With the ASC (Alignment Sensing Control) off and only the length controls on, the Mode Cleaner didn't lock easily, although I knew I wasn't very far from the sweet spot.

In the afternoon the struggle continued and the matching of the the beam to the MC cavity became just worse. At some point I noticed that the ASC inputs somehow had got on - although the ASC still looked disabled from the MClock MEDM main screen. So I was actually working against the Wave Front Sensors and further worsening the periscope alignment.

That hurled me to the weeds. After hours of rowing across the stormy waters of a four-dimensional universe I got to have occasional TEM00 flashes at the transmission but still, surprisingly, no MC locking. Confused, I kept tuning the periscope but that just kicked me off road again.

Then at about 7pm Koji came to my rescue and suggested a more clever and systematic way to solve the problems. He suggested to keep record of the MC mirrors alignment state and re-align the cavity to the periscope. Then we would gradually bring the cavity back to the original good position changing the periscope alignment at the same time.

That would have worked straight away, if we hadn't been fighting against a subtle and cruel enemy: the 40m computer network. But I (as John Connor), and Koji (as the Terminator) didn't pull back.

Here's a short list of the kinds of weapons that the computers threw to us:

1. After a while the FSS entered a funny state. It showed transmission: we had light at the MC (and even flashes) but the MEDM readout of the FSS transmitted power after the cavity was low (~0.019). Also the spot on the monitor showed a slightly different pattern from how I remembered it. On the other side the transmission camera didn't show that typical halo as usual.
2. MCL was frozen at 32768. I ran the MCDown and MCUp script a couple of times and that unstuck it.
3. On op340m we found that the MC autolocker script wasn't running. So I restarted it. Still nothing changed: bright and sharp flashes appeared on the monitor (sign of a not too bad alignment) but no lock.
4. I rebooted C1IOO. No change.
5. I rebooted C1DCUEPICS and burtrestored the EPICS computers to Jul 19th. No change.
6. Then I burtrestored the c1psl.snapshot and that finally did something. The FSS reflected spot changed and the halo appeared again at its transmission camera. Soon after the MC got locked.

We then proceeded with Koji's plan. In an iterative process, we aligned the MC cavity maximizing the transmission and tuned the periscope in order to match the Faraday input of the interferometer. The last thing we did it by looking at the camera pointing at the Faraday isolator.

We found that we didn't have to tune the periscope much. That means that all afternoon I didn't really go too far, but the autolocker wasn't working properly, or it wasn't working at all.

Then we ran the alignment script for the X arm but it didn't work before we aligned the steering mirrors.

Then we ran it three times but could not get more than 0.87 at TRX. That means that there we still have to work on the alignment to the Faraday. That's job for today in the trenches of the lab.