Lately I've been trying to improve the PLL for the AbsL experiment so that it could handle larger frequency steps and thus speed up the cavity scan.

The maximum frequency step that the PLL could handle withouth losing lock is given by the DC gain of the PLL. This is the product of the mixer's gain factor K [rad/V ], of the laser's calibration C [Hz/V] and of the PLL filter DC gain F(0).

I measured these quantities: K=0.226 V/rad; C=8.3e6 Hz/V and F(0)=28.7dB=21.5. The max frequency step should be Delta_f_max = 6.4MHz.

Although in reality the PLL can't handle more than a 10 KHz step. There's probably some other effect that I'm not.

I'm attaching here plots of the PLL Open Loop Gain, of the PLL filter and of a spectra of the error point measured in different circumstances.

I don't have much time to explain here how I took all those measurements. After I fix the problem, I'm going to go go through those details in an elog entry.

Does anyone have any suggestion about what, in principle, might be limiting the frequency step?

I already made sure that both cables going to the mixer (the cable with the beat signal coming from the photodiode and the cable with the LO signal coming from the Marconi) had the same length. Although ideally, for phase locking, I would still need 90 degrees of phase shift between the mixing signals, over the entire frequency range for which I do the cavity scan. By now the 90 degrees are not guaranteed.

Also, I have a boost that adds another 20 dB at DC to the PLL's filter. Although it doesn't change anything. In fact, as said above calculating the frequency step, the PLL should be able to handle 100KHz steps, as I would want the PLL to do.

I just aligned PRM and locked PRC and I noticed that SPOB is much higehr than it used to be. It's now about 1800, vs 1200 than it used to be last week.

Isn't anyone related to that? If so, may I please know how he/she did it?

 oops, my bad.  I cranked the 33MHz modulation depth and forgot to put it back.  The slider should go back to around 3. 

 I was actually hoping that the alignment got better.

I might have found the problem with the PLL that was preventing me from scanning the frequencies by 100KHz steps. A dumb flimsy soldering in the circuit was making the PLL unstable.

After I fixed that problem and also after writing a cleverer data acquisition script in Python,  I was able to scan continuosly the range 10-200MHz in about 20min (versus the almost 1.5-2 hrs that I could do previously). I'm attaching the results to this entry.

The 'smears' on the right side of the resonance at ~33MHz, are due to the PSL's sideband. I think I know how to fix that.

As you can see, the problem is that the model for the cavity transmission still does not match very well the data. As a result, the error on the cavity length is too big (~> 10 cm - I'd like to have 1mm).

Anyway, that was only my first attempt of scanning. I'm going to repeat the measurement today too and see if I can come out better. If not, than I have to rethink the model I've been using to fit.

I want to try to do the measurement with the network analyzer used as local oscillator, instead of the Marconis that I'm using now. Tha could give me better noise rejection. It would also give me information about the phase.

Also I wouldn't dislike abandoning the GPIB interfaces to acquire data.

Last night (Mar 17) I checked the PLL setup as Mott have had some difficulty to get a clean lock of the PLL setting.

• I firstly found that the NPRO beam is not going through the Faraday isolator well. This was fixed by aligning the steering mirrors before the Faraday.
   
• The signal from the RF PD was send to the RF spectrum analyzer through a power splitter. This is a waist of the signal. It was replaced to a directional coupler.
   
• Tee-ing the PZT feedback to the oscilloscope was producing the noise in the laser frequency. I put the oscilloscope to the 600Ohm output of the SR560, while connectiong the PZT output to the 50Ohm output.
   
• In addition, 6dB+6dB attenuators have been added to the PZT feedback signal.

Now the beating signal is much cleaner and behave straight forward. I will add some numbers such as the PD DC output, RF levels, SR560 settings...

Now I am feeling that we definitely need the development of really clean PLL system as we use PLL everywhere! (i.e. wideband PD, nice electronics, summing amplifiers, stop poking SR560, customize/specialize PDH box, ...etc)

I also had noticed the progressive change of the aux NPRO alignment to the Farady.

I strongly agree about the need of a good and robust PLL.

By modifying the old PDH box (version 2008) eventually I was able to get a PLL robust enough for my purposes. At some point that wasn't good enough for me either.

I then decided to redisign it from scratch. I'm going to work on it. Also because of my other commitments, I'd need a few days/1 week for that. But I'd still like to take care of it. Is it more urgent than that?

We use the current PLL just now, but the renewal of the components are not immediate as it will take some time. Even so we need steady steps towards the better PLL. I appreciate your taking care of it.

I checked the setup further more.

• I replaced the PD from NewFocus 1GHz one to Thorlabs PDA255.
• I macthed the power level of the each beam.

Now I have significant fraction of beating (30%) and have huge amplitude (~9dBm).
The PLL can be much more stable now.

Koji

 It looks like the PLL drifted alot over the weekend, and we couldn't get it back to 9 dBm.  We switched back to the new focus wideband PD to make it easier to find the beat signal.  I replaced all the electronics with the newly fixed UPDH box (#17) and we aligned it to the biggest beat frequency we could get, which ended up being -27 dBm with a -6.3V DC signal from the PD.  

Locking was still elusive, so we calculated the loop gain and found the UGF is about 45 kHz, which is too high.  We added a 20 dB attenuator to the RF input to suppress the gain and we think we may have locked at 0 gain.  I am going to add another attenuator (~6 dB) so that we can tune the gain using the gain knob on the UPDH box.  

Finally, attached is a picture of the cable that served as the smb - BNC adaptor for the DC output of the PD.  The signal was dependent on the angle of the cable into the scope or multimeter.  It has been destroyed so that it can never harm another innocent experiment again!

We have managed to lock the PLL to reasonable stability. The RF input is attenuated by 26 dBm and the beat signal locks very close to the carrier of the marconi (the steps on the markers of the spectrum analyzer are coarse).  We can use the marconi and the local boost of the pdh box to catch the lock at 0 gain.  Once the lock is on, the gain can be increased to stabilize the lock.  The locked signals are shown in the first photo (the yellow is the output of the mixer and the blue is the output to the fast input of the laser.  If the gain is increased too high, the error signal enters an oscillatory regime, which probably indicates we are overloading the piezo.  This is shown in the second photo, the gain is being increased in time and we enter the non-constant regime around mid-way through.

Tomorrow I will use this locked system to measure the PZT response (finally!).

 After realigning and getting the lock today, I tried to add in the SR785 to measure the transfer function.  As soon as I turn on the piezo input on the PDH box, however, the lock breaks and I cannot reacquire it.  We are using an SR650 to add in the signal from the network analyzer and that has worked. We also swapped the 20 dB attenuator for a box which mimics the boost functionality (-20 dB above 100 Hz, 0 dB below 6Hz).  I took some spectra with the SR750, and will get some more with the network analyzer once Alberto has finished with it. 

The SR750 spectra is posted below.  The SR750 only goes up to 100 kHz, so I will have to use the network analyzer to get the full range. 

[Suresh / Kiwamu]

 We did the following things :

   - Took the LightWave NPRO out from the MOPA box

   - Temporarily took out the laser controller which has been connected to the Y end laser.

   - Put the LightWave on AP table and plugged the laser controller and confirmed that it still emits a beam

[Things to be done]

   - measure the beam profiles and power

   - get a laser controller, which will be dedicated for this laser, from Peter King

[Background and Motivation]

 The PRC and SRC length have to be precisely measured before the vent.

In order to measure those absolute length we are going to use the Stochino technique, which requires another laser to scan the cavity profiles.

The LightWave NPRO laser in the MOPA box was chosen for the Stochino laser because it has a large PZT range of 5 MHz/V and hence allows us to measure a wider frequency range.

The laser in the MOPA box had been connected to home-made circuits, which are not handy to play with. So we decided to use the laser with the usual laser controller.

Peter King said he has a LightWave laser controller and he can hand it to us.

Until we get the controller from him we do some preparations with temporary use of the Y end laser controller.

The I-P curve of the LightWave NPRO (M126-1064-700), which was taken out from the MOPA box, was measured. It looks healthy.

The output power can go up to about 1 W, but I guess we don't want it to run at a high power to avoid any further degradation since the laser is old.

 X-axis is the current read from the display of the controller. Y-axis is the output power, directly measured by Coherent PM10.

The measurement was done by changing the current from the controller.

Hmm. Was the current within the operating range? (i.e. Is it a 700mW laser or a 1W one?)

You can obtain the nominal operating current from the old EPICS values (or some elog entries).

Note that NPROs are designed to be healthy only at around the nominal pumping power
(i.e. thermal gradient, and thermal lensing of the crystal, etc.)

ALSO:

Be aware that this laser should be used under the old SOP. So the appropriate interlocking is mandatory.

And probably we need to modify the SOP such that it reflects the latest situation.

 Put the serial numbers into the elog. So we can identify the laser and controller in the future.

The old days the NPRO ( inside the MOPA ) was running ~1.7A  500 mW

Peter King came over to the 40m with a laser controller and gave it to us.

We will test it out with the LightWave NPRO, which was used for MOPA.

 The I-P curve was measured again, but this time in a lower current range of 1.0-1.9 [A].

The plot below is the latest I-P curve.

(Decision)

Based on the measurement and some thoughts, I decided to run this laser at about 1.8 [A] which gives us a middle power of ~ 360 [mW].

In the 40m history, the laser had been driven at 2.4 [A] in years of approximately 2006-2009, so it's possible to run it at such a high power,

but on the other hand Steve suggested to run it with a smaller power such that the laser power doesn't degrade so fast.

(notes)

  The laser controller handed from PK (#4855) was used in this measurement.

The nominal current was tuned to be 1.8 [A] by tuning a potentiometer on the laser head (see page.18 on the manual of LWE).

There was a huge bump around 1.4 [A] and sudden power drop at 1.48 [A] although I don't know the reason.

The beam profile of the LWE (LightWave Electronics) NPRO was measured.

Mode matching telescopes will be designed and setup soon based on the result of the measurements.

Here is a plot of the measured beam profile.

 (some notes)

The measurement was done by using Kevin's power attenuation technique (#3030).

An window was put just after the NPRO and the reflected beam was sampled for the measurement to avoid the beam scan saturated.

 Lightwave Laser Head M126-1064-700   sn238,  mounted on full size Al base and side heat sink on

Controller 125/126 Smart Supply   sn 201M

Status update of the absolute length (ABSL) measurement:

 - To accommodate the ABSL stuff, the AS path was relocated on the AP table.

     (In this evening Jenne was able to lock MICH with AS55, so it's working fine.)

 - On the AP table all of the necessary items, including the NPRO, a Faraday, some mirrors and etc., were in place

 - The mode matching was coarsely done. The Rayleigh range looked reasonably long.

 - Fine alignments will be done tomorrow

 - Also a picture of the setup will be uploaded in the morning.

Here is a picture of the latest ABSL setup at the east part of the AP table.

(Some notes )

 - The ABSL laser is injected from the AP port.

  - A 90 % reflection BS was installed just after the NPRO, this is for sampling a 10% of the laser to the PSL table.

    However, I've just realized that this is not a nice way because the 10 % beam doesn't  go through the Faraday. Whoops.

 - A polarzser cell at the input side of the Faraday doesn't let any beam go through it for some reasons (broken ?).

    Therefore instead of having such a bad cell, a cube PBS was installed.

 -  A room was left on the table for the AS165 RFPD (green-dashed rectangular in the picture).

(Just a quick report)

The fine alignment of the ABSL laser injection was successfully done.

I was able to see the DRMI fringings at the AS camera. The ABSL beam is injected from the AS port, therefore what I saw on the camera was the reflection back from the interferometer.

(Things to be done)

 -  A beat-note setup on the PSL table.

 - Refinement of the mode matching. The beam spot on the AS camera is a bit bigger, so I should more tightly focus the injected beam.

Here I show two photos of the latest ABSL (ABSolute Length measurement) setup.

Figure.1 : A picture of the ABSL setup on the AP table.

  The setup has been a little bit modified from the before (#4923).

 As I said on the entry #4923, the way of sampling the ABSL laser wasn't so good because the beam, which didn't go through the faraday, was sampled.

In this latest configuration the laser is sampled after the faraday with a 90% beam splitter.

The transmitted light from the 90% BS (written in pink) is sent to the PSL table through the access tube which connects the AP and PSL table .

FIgure.2: A picture of the ABSL setup on the PSL table.

 The 10% sampled beam ( pink beam in the picture) eventually comes to the PSL table via the access tube (the hole on the left hand side of the picture).

Then the ABSL beam goes through a mode matching telescope, which consists of a combination of a concave and a convex lens.

The PSL laser (red line in the picture) is sampled from a point after the doubling crystal.

The beam is combined at a 50 % BS, which has been setup for several purposes( see for example #3759 and #4339 ) .

A fast response PD (~1 GHz) is used for the beat-note detection.

In this past weekend the ABSL laser was successfully frequency-locked to the PSL laser with a frequency offset of about 100 MHz.

In the current setup a mixer-based frequency discriminator is used for detection of the beat-note frequency.

Setup for frequency locking

 The diagram below shows the setup for the frequency locking.

Temperature setpoints

I made some attempts to measure the current length of the arm cavities by using the mass-kicking technique.

However unfortunately I am running out my energy to complete the measurement,

so I will finish the measurement at some time today.

I still have to set an appropriate kick amplitude. Right now I am injecting AWG into ETMY_LSC_EXC at 0.2 Hz with amplutde of 400 cnts.

I guess it needs a little bit more amplitude to get more psuedo-constant velocity.

Volunteers are always welcome !

(some notes)

The procedure was well-described in entry #555 by Dr.Stochino.

Here is just an example of the time series that I took today showing how the time series looks like.

 Why not just scan the Green laser to measure the arm lengths instead? The FSR of the arm is ~3.75 MHz and so all you have to do is lock the arm green and then sweep the PZT until the resonance is found at 3.75 MHz.

The shutter of the ABSL laser is closed for the vent work.

 Sendhil and I installed the S polarized BS on the ITMY table to steer the NPRO beam through the AR wedge and align it to the POY beam. 

We took a shutter from the BSPRM table (which was not used) and a beam dump from the AS table (which was used by the auxiliary laser already removed and installed on the ITMY).

To do: do better alignment of the NPRO beam, maybe installing some iris after the BS and before the AS wedge, phase lock the two beams. 

Re:  POY beam reduction.

We are able to lock the Yarm with the beam / gain as it is.  I had thought we might need to increase the DC gain in the whitening board by a factor of 2, but so far it's fine.

After measuring the beat note, the "Alberto" NPRO auxiliary laser has been moved from the PSL table to the POY table. Its beam profile is going to be measured. It's going to be used as green laser on the END table, in place of the broken one.

The auxiliary laser borrowed form ATF lab (which will be used for the ABSL measurement) has been set on the PSL table to make a measurement of the beat note between it and the main laser.

The setup is mostly the same of the previous beat note measurement . In this case, laser input power is 326 mW, so I needed to replace one of the mirrors of the steering optics with a BS 50% reflecting in order to have less than 1 mW on the PD.

Now, the total power on the PD is less than 0.5 mW.

I didn't measure the beat note yet to leave the PSL table as quite as possible for the locking procedures.

To do:

Measure the beat note, fiber coupling the NPRO laser to bring it to the POY table.

The beat note for the ATF lab laser has been found. 

The measurement has been carried out in the same way as described in elog 8368.

The only difference is that in this case I started from a temperature of 35.2 degC, and I reduced it until the minimum which was 30.71 degC. No beat note in this range.

Then I rised on the temperature and I found the first beat note at 41.46 degC. It has been detected at a frequency of about 120 MHz with an RF power of -53 dBm and a frequency fluctuation of about  +/- 5 MHz. 

I tried to improve the alignment to have a stronger beat, but it was the maximum I could reach. Maybe I could increase the power hitting the photodiode, which was 0.453 mW. 

The ATF NPRO auxiliary laser has been moved on the PSL table. All the optics for beat note measurement are in place and alignment has been done.

The setup for this measurement is the same as described in elog 8333.

I've disabled the alarm for PEM_count_half, using the mask in the 40m.alhConfig file.  We can't do anything about it, and it's just annoying.

I turned the StripTool and ALARMS and BLRMS back on on op540m. Looks like it has been rebooted 5 days ago and no one turned these back on. Also, there was a bunch of junk strewn around its keyboard which I restrained myself from throwing in the trash.

The BLRMS trends should be active now.

Please!

Don't put laptops on the ISC Tables!

A small rat / large mouse just ran through the control room. Ugh.

Fire alarm went off several minutes ago. Talked to security and they said there was no fire. It beeped twice again just now. No one has been working on the IFO today.

The fire alarm came on around 15:05  for about 2-3 minutes. We all  left the lab and counted heads.  I called Paul Mackel x2646 (cell 626/ 890- 3259) at Fire Protection Services. He said that this alarm test was planned and we should of got an email notice. Perhaps I missed that notes.

It is posted at the 40m wiki with Gautam' help. Printed copies posted around doors also.

There was an alarm sound from the Smart-UPS 2200 sitting under the workstation. I see that the 'replace battery' light is red, and this elog tells me that these batteries are replaced every ~1-4 years; the last replacement was march 2016. Holding down the 'test' button for 2-3 seconds results in the alarm sound and does not clear the replace battery indicator.

Rana, Naomi

We dither locked the X arm and then aligned the green beam to it using the PZTs. Everything looks ready for us to do a mode scan tomorrow.

We got buildup for Red and Green, but saw no beat in the control room. Quick glance at the PSL seems OK, but needs more investigation. We did not try moving around the X-NPRO temperature.

Tomorrow: get the beat, scan the PhaseTracker, and get data using pyNDS.

Last week, we were talking about reviving the Fiber ALS box. Right now, it's not in great shape. Some changes to be made:

1. Supply power to the PDs (Menlo FPD310) via a power regulator board. The datasheet says the current consumption per PD is 250 mA. So we need 500mA. We have the D1000217 power regulator board available in the lab. It uses the LM2941 and LM2991 power regulator ICs, both of which are rated for 1A output current, so this seems suitable for our purposes. Thoughts?
2. Install power decoupling capacitors on the PDs.
3. Clean up the fiber arrangement inside the box.
4. Install better switches, plus LED indicators.
5. Cover the box.
6. Install it in a better way on the PSL table. Thoughts? e.g. can we mount the unit in some electronics rack and route the fibers to the rack? Perhaps the PSL IR and one of the arm fibers are long enough, but the other arm might be tricky.

Previous elog thread about work done on this box: elog11650

Summary:

Between frequent MC1 excursions, I worked on ALS recovery today. Attachment #1 shows the out-of-loop ALS noise as of today evening (taken with arms locked to IR) - I have yet to check loop shapes of the ALS servos, looks like there is some tuning to be done.

On the PSL table:

• First, I locked the arms to IR, ran the dither alignment servos to maximize transmission.
• I used the IR beat PDs to make sure a beat existed, at approximately.
• Then I used a scope to monitor the green beat, and tweaked steering mirror alignment until the beat amplitude was maximized. I was able to improve the X arm beat amplitude, which Koji and Naomi had tweaked last week, by ~factor of 2, and Y arm by ~factor of 10.
• I used the DC outputs of the BBPDs to center the beam onto the PD.
• Currently, the beat notes have amplitudes of ~-40dBm on the scopes in the control room (there are various couplers/amplifiers in the path so I am not sure what beatnote amplitude this translates to at the BBPD output). I have yet to do a thorough power budget, but I have in my mind that they used to be ~-30dBm. To be investigated.
• Removed the fiber beat PD 1U chassis unit from the PSL table for further work. The fibers have been capped and remain on the PSL table. Cleaned the NW corner of the PSL table up a bit.

To do:

• Optimization of the input pointing of the green beam for X (with PZTs) and Y (manual) arms.
• ALS PDH servo loop measurement. Attachment #1 suggests some loop gain adjustment is required for both arms (although the hump centered around ~70Hz seem to be coming from the IR lock).
• Power budgeting on the PSL table to compare to previous such efforts.

Note: Some of the ALS scripts are suffering from the recent inablilty of cdsutils to pull up testpoints (e.g. the script that is used to set the UGFs of the phase tracker servo). The workaround is to use DTT to open the test points first (just grab 0.1s time series for all channels of interest). Then the cdsutils scripts can read the required channels (but you have to keep the DTT open).

Today, I borrowed the fiber microscope from Johannes and took a look at the fibers coupled to the PDs. The PD labelled "BEAT PD AUX Y" has an end that seems scratched (Attachments #1 and #2). The scratch seems to be on (or at least very close to) the core. The other PD (Attachments #3 and #4) doesn't look very clean either, but at least the area near the core seems undamaged. The two attachments for each PD corresponds to the two available lighting settings on the fiber microscope.

I have not attempted to clean them yet, though I have also borrowed the cleaning supplies to facilitate this from Johannes. I also plan to inspect the ends of all other fiber connections before re-installing them.

Today, with Johannes' help, I cleaned the fiber tips of the photodiodes. The effect of the cleaning was dramatic - see Attachments #1-4, which are X Beat PD, axial illumination, X Beat PD, oblique illumination, Y beat PD, axial illumination, Y beat PD, oblique illumination. They look much cleaner now, and the feature that looked like a scratch has vanished.

The cleaning procedure followed was:

• Blow clean air over the fiber tip
• First, we tried cleaning with the Q-tip like tool, but the results weren't great. The way to use it is to dip the tip in the cleaning solvent for a few seconds, hold the tip to the fiber taking into account the angled cut, and apply 10 gentle quarter turns.
• Next, we tried cleaning with the wipes. We peeled out an approximately 5" section of the wipe, and laid it out on the table. We then applied cleaning solvent liberally on the central area where we were sure we hadn't touched the wipe. Then you just drag the fiber tip along the soaked part of the wipe. If you get the angle exactly right, the fiber glides smoothly along the surface, but if you are a little misaligned, you get a scratchy sensation. 
• Blow dry and inspect.

I will repeat this procedure for all fiber connections once I start putting the box back together - I'm almost done with the new box, just waiting on some hardware to arrive.

[ericq, gautam]

• I was just getting the IFO aligned, and single arm lock going, when EricQ came in and asked if we could get some ALS data.
• ALS beats seemed fine, in particular the X-Arm. The broad hump around ~70Hz that was present in my previous ALS update was nowhere to be seen - reasons unknown.
• Copied over /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/YARM/Lock_ALS_YARM.py to /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/scripts/XARM/Lock_ALS_XARM.py. Could be useful when we want to do arm cavity scans.
• Made appropriate changes to allow ALS locking of Xarm - the testpoint inaccessibility makes things a little annoying but for tonight we just used DQ channels in place (or slow channels when DQ chans were not available)
• Calibration of X arm error signal seemed off - so we fixed it by driving a line in ETMX and matching up the peaks in the ALS error signal and POX11. We then updated the gain of the filter in the CINV filter bank accordingly.
• Got some decent data - X arm stayed locked on ALS for >60mins, during which time the Y arm stayed locked on POY11, and the Y green also reained locked . There was no evidence of the X arm 00 mode randomly dropping out of lock tonight.
• EQ will update with a sick comparison plot - today we looked at the ALS noise from the perspective of the Green Locking Izumi et. al. paper.
• Y arm ALS noise didn't look so hot tonight - to be investigated...

Leaving LSC mode OFF for now while CDS is still under investigation

Not really related to this work: We saw that the safe.snap file for c1oaf seems to have gotten overwritten at some point. I restored the EPICS values from a known good time, and over-wrote the safe.snap file.