I measured the reflected power from the PBS as a function of half wave plate rotation for five different quarter wave plate rotations.

The optimum angles that minimize the reflected power are 330° for the quarter wave plate and 268° for the half wave plate.

The following data was taken with 2.102 A laser current and 32.25° C crystal temperature.

For each of five quarter wave plate settings around the optimum value, I measured the reflected power from the PBS with an Ophir power meter. I measured the power as a function of half wave plate angle five times for each angle and averaged these values to calculate the mean and uncertainty for each of these angles. The Ophir started to drift when trying to measure relatively large amounts of power. (With approximately 1W reflected from the PBS, the power reading rapidly increased by several hundred mW.) So I could only take data near the minimum reflection accurately.

The data was fit to P = P0 + P1*sin^2(2pi/180*(t-t0)) with the angle t measured in degrees with the following results:

where V is the visibility V = 1- P_max/P_min. These fits are shown in attachment 1. We would like to understand better why we can only reduce the reflected light to ~150 mW. Ideally, we would have V = 1. I will redo these measurements with a different power meter that can measure up to 2 W and take data over a full period of the reflected power.

[Rana and Kevin]

I made a low pass filter for the piezo driver for the 2W laser that is now installed. The filter has a pole at 2.9 Hz. The transfer function is shown in attachment 1.

Attachment 2 shows the outside of the filter with the circuit diagram and attachment 2 shows the inside of the filter.

[Koji and Kevin]

Since there was still a lot of power being reflected from the PBS before the Faraday rotator, I placed another PBS at the reflection from the first PBS to investigate the problem. If everything was ideal, we would expect the PBS to transmit P polarization and reflect S polarization. Thus, if the laser was entirely in the TEM00 mode, with the quarter and half wave plates we should be able to rotate the polarizations so that all of the power is transmitted through the PBS. In reality, some amount of P is reflected in addition to S reducing the power transmitted. (We are not sure what the PBS is since there are no markings on it but CVI says that their cubes should have less than 5% P reflection).

For the following measurements, the laser crystal temperature was 31.8° C, the current was 2.1 A, the half wave plate was at 267° and the quarter wave plate was at 330°. I first measured the power reflected from the first PBS then added the second PBS to this reflected light and measured the transmitted and reflected powers from this PBS with the following results:

This shows that approximately 81 mW of P polarization was being reflected from the first PBS and that there is approximately 48 mW of S polarization that could not be rotated into P with the two wave plates. Attachment 1 shows the shape of the reflected (S polarization) beam from the second PBS. This shows that the S polarization is not in TEM00 and can not be rotated by the wave plates. The transmitted P polarization is in TEM00.

We then rotated the first PBS (in yaw) to minimize the amount of P being reflected. Repeating the above measurement with the current alignment gives

Thus by rotating the cube to minimize the amount of P reflected, ~70 mW more power is transmitted through the cube. This adjustment moved the beam path slightly so Koji realigned the Faraday rotator and EOM. The PMC was then locked and the beam was realigned on the PMC. At 2.1 A, the transmission through the PMC is 6.55 V and the reflection is 178 mV. With the PMC unlocked, the reflection is 312 mV. This gives a visibility of 0.43.

Note by KA:
We realigned the beam toward the PMC at 1.0A at first so that we don't cook any parts. Once we get the TEM00 resonance, the steering mirrors were aligned to maximize the PMC transmission. Then the pumping current was increased to 2.1A.

[Koji and Kevin]

I was trying to characterize the REFL11 photodiode by shining a flashlight on the photodiode and measuring the DC voltage with an oscilloscope and the RF voltage with a spectrum analyzer. At first, I had the photodiode voltage supplied incorrectly with 15V between the +15 and -15 terminals. After correcting this error, and checking that the power was supplied correctly to the board, no voltage could be seen when light was incident on the photodiode.

We looked at the REFL55 photodiode and could see ~200 mV of DC voltage when shining a light on it but could not see any signal at 55 MHz. If the value of 50 ohm DC transimpedance is correct, this should be enough to see an RF signal. Tomorrow, we will look into fixing the REFL11 photodiode.

[Jenne and Kevin]

I started testing the REFL55 photodiode. With a light bulb, I saw ~270 mV of DC voltage from the photodiode but still could not see any RF signal. I connected the RF out from the spectrum analyzer to the test input and verified that the circuit was working.

I then set up the AM laser and looked at the laser light with REFL11 and an 1811 photodiode. I was able to see an RF signal and verified that the resonant frequency is 55 MHz.

The current setup is not very reliable because the laser is not mounted rigidly. Next, I will work on making this mounting more reliable and will continue to work on finding an RF signal with a flashlight.

I measured the optical and electrical transfer functions for REFL55 and calculated the RF transimpedance. To measure the optical transfer function, I used the light from an AM laser to simultaneously measure the transfer functions of REFL55 and a New Focus 1611 photodiode. I combined these two transfer functions to get the RF transimpedance for REFL55. I also measured the electrical transfer function by putting the RF signal from the network analyzer in the test input of the photodiode.

I put all of the plots on the wiki at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/REFL55.

[Koji, Rana, and Kevin]

I have been trying to measure the shot noise of REFL55 by shining a light bulb on the photodiode and measuring the noise with a spectrum analyzer. The measured dark noise of REFL55 is 35 nV/rtHz. I have been able to get 4 mA of DC current on the photodiode but have not been able to see any shot noise.

I previously measured the RF transimpedance of REFL55 by simultaneously measuring the transfer functions of REFL55 and a new focus 1611 photodiode with light from an AM laser. By combining these two transfer functions I calculated that the RF transimpedance at 55 MHz is ~ 200 ohms. With this transimpedance the shot noise at 4 mA is only ~ 7 nV/rtHz and would not be detectable above the dark noise.

The value of 200 ohms for the transimpedance seems low but it agrees with Alberto's previous measurements. By modeling the photodiode circuit as an RLC circuit at resonance with the approximate values of REFL55 (a photodiode capacitance of 100 pF and resistance of 10 ohms and an inductance of 40 nH), I calculated that the transimpedance should be ~ 230 ohms at 55 MHz. Doing the same analysis for the values of REFL11 shows that the transimpedance at 11 MHz should be ~ 2100 ohms. A more careful analysis should include the notch filters but this should be approximately correct at resonance and suggests that the 200 ohm measurement is correct for the current REFL55 circuit.

I measured the RF transimpedance of the POX photodiode by measuring the optical transfer function with the AM laser and by measuring the shot noise with a light bulb. The plots of these measurements are at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POX.

I measured the noise of the photodiode at 11 MHz for different light intensities using an Agilent 4395a. The noise of a 50 ohm resistor as measured by this spectrum analyzer is 10.6 nV/rtHz. I fit this noise data to the shot noise formula to find the RF transimpedance at 11 MHz to be (2.42 ± 0.08) kΩ. The RF transimpedance at 11 MHz as measured by the transfer function is 6.4 kΩ.

[Koji, Jenne, Kevin]

Jenne worked on fixing REFL11 last week (see elog 4034) and was able to measure an electrical transfer function. Today, I tried to measure an optical transfer function but REFL11 is still not responding to any optical input. I tried shining both the laser and a flashlight on the PD but could not get any DC voltage.

I also completed the characterizations of POX. I redid the optical transfer function and shot noise measurements. I also took a time series of the RF output from the PD when it was powered on with no light. This measurement shows oscillations at about 225 MHz. I also measured the spectrum with no light which also shows the oscillations at 225 MHz and smaller oscillations at ~455 MHz.

The plots can be found at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POX?action=show.

I redid the optical POX transfer functions and updated the wiki at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POX.

I measured each transfer function several times to calculate uncertainties for each measured point. There is one large transfer function from 1 MHz to 500 MHz showing a resonance peak at 11 MHz and notches at 22 MHz and 55 MHz. I also made more detailed measurements around each of these resonance peaks. These measurements were fit to a resonance curve to determine the resonant frequency, transimpedance at resonance, and Q for each peak. These measurements agree with the shot noise measurement for the transimpedance at 11 MHz taken earlier considering that this measurement was made at 11 MHz instead of at the resonant frequency of 11.14 MHz.

I measured these transfer functions with the Agilent 4395a using the netgpib.py script last week. I realized that when using this script to save multiple copies of the same measurement after setting up the instrument, the first and second measurements are saved but all measurements saved after are identical to the second measurement until the instrument is physically reset. This happens because the analyzer switches the trigger from continuous to hold after making a measurement using this script. Kiwamu said that the script can be modified to return the trigger to continuous after saving the data so that multiple measurements can be saved without being at the analyzer physically. I did not want to waste more time figuring out how to modify the script to do this so I used one of the netbooks and sat at the analyzer manually returning the trigger to continuous after each measurement.

 The value of I_dc was a mistake. The value should be 240 µA.

The widths of the resonance peaks are listed below the fits to each peak on the wiki.

[Koji, Kevin]

We fit the entire POX optical transfer function from 1 MHz to 500 MHz in LISO. The fit is on the wiki at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POX. Using LISO's root fitting mode, we found that the transfer function has five poles and four zeros.

I will work on making plots of the residuals. This is difficult because by default, LISO does not calculate the fitting function at the frequencies of the data points themselves and I haven't figured out how to force it to do this yet.

[Rana and Kevin]

I measured the optical transfer function of POY and fit the data using LISO. The fit can be found at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POY. POY was missing the RF cage and back cover so I took those parts from AS55 in order to make these measurements.

POY does not have the unwanted oscillations at 225 MHz that POX has. Attachment 1 shows the transfer functions of POX and POY.

To measure the transfer functions, I used a 50/50 beam splitter to send half the light from an AM laser to POY and half the light to a New Focus 1611 reference photodiode. The transfer function for POY was measured as the transfer function of the signal from POY divided by the signal from the 1611. When I was measuring the transfer function for POX, I failed to ensure that the photodiodes were operating linearly. Before making the measurements for POY, I varied the RF power modulating the AM laser and recorded the magnitude of the transfer function at the 11 MHz peak. Attachment 2 shows these values. The measurements for POY were made in the linear region at an RF power of -10 dBm. The measurements for POX were made at 0 dBm and were most likely not in the linear region for POX.

[Koji and Kevin]

I measured the shot noise of POY and fit the data to determine the RF transimpedance at 11 MHz and the dark current. The transimpedance is (3.860 +- 0.006) kΩ. I realize that there are not many data points past the dark current but I did not want to take any further data because the light bulb was getting pretty bright. If this is a problem, I can try to redo the measurement using a lens to try to focus more of the light from the bulb onto the photodiode.

I also measured the spectrum and recorded a time series of the RF signal with the light to the photodiode blocked. These measurements do not show any large oscillations like the ones found for POX.

The plots of the measurements are on the wiki at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POY.

[Kevin, Rana, Koji]

I calculated the dark noise of POX and POY due to Johnson noise and voltage and current noise from the MAX4107 op-amp using nominal values for the circuit components found in their data sheets. I found that the dark noise should be approximately 15.5 nV/rtHz. The measured dark noise values are 18.35 nV/rtHz and 98.5 nV/rtHz for POX and POY respectively. The shot noise plots on the wiki have been updated to show these calculated dark noise sources.

The measured dark noise for POY is too high. I will look into the cause of this large noise. It is possible that the shot noise measurement for POY was bad so I will start by redoing the measurement.

The previous measurement for the shot noise of POY had the dark noise at ~100 nV/rtHz. I redid the measurement and got 26 nV/rtHz for the dark noise. I think that when I made the previous measurement, the spectrum analyzer had automatically added some attenuation to the input that I failed to remove. This added attenuation raised the noise floor of the measurement making the dark noise of POY appear larger than it is.

The updated measurement can be found on the wiki at http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/POY.

I measured the transfer function, shot noise, and dark spectrum of AS55.

From the shot noise measurement, the RF transimpedance is (556.3 +- 0.8) Ohms and the dark current is (2.39 +- 0.01) mA. The dark noise agrees with the approximate value calculated from the circuit components.

There are no anomalous oscillations when there is no light on the photodiode. I am working on fitting the transfer function in LISO but the other plots are on the wiki at http://blue.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Electronics/AS55

I changed the heater circuit described in this elog to a current sink. The new and old circuits are shown in the attachment. The heater is  and is currently 24Ω; the sense resistor  is currently 6Ω. The op-amp is still an OP27 and the MOSFET is still an IRF630.

The current through the old circuit was saturating because the gate voltage on the MOSFET was saturating at the op-amp supply rails. This is because the source voltage is relatively high: .

In the new circuit the source voltage is lower and the op-amp can thus drive a large enough to draw more current (until the power supply saturates at 25V/30Ω = 0.8A in this case). The source and DAC voltages are equal in this case and so the current is . Since this is the same current through the heater, the drain voltage is . I observed this behavior in this circuit until the power supply saturated at 0.8A. Note that when this happens and the gate voltage saturates at the supply rails in an attempt to supply the necessary current.

Gautam and I looked into the DAC noise contribution to the noise budget for homodyne detection at the 40m. DAC noise is currently the most likely limiting source of technical noise.

Several of us have previously looked into the optimal SRC detuning and homodyne angle to observe pondermotive squeezing at the 40m. The first attachment summarizes these investigations and shows the amount of squeezing below vacuum obtainable as a function of homodyne angle for an optimal SRC detuning including fundamental classical sources of noise (seismic, CTN, and suspension thermal). These calculations are done with an Optickle model. According to the calculations, it's possible to see 6 dBvac of squeezing around 100 Hz.

The second attachment shows the amount of squeezing obtainable including DAC noise as a function of current noise in the DAC electronics. These calculations are done at the optimal -0.45 deg SRC detuning and 97 deg homodyne angle. Estimates of this noise are computed as is done in elog 13146 and include de-whitening. It is not possible to observe squeezing with the current 400 Ω series resistor which corresponds to 30 pA/rtHz current noise at 100 Hz. We can get to 0 dBvac for current noise of around 10 pA/rtHz (1.2 kΩ series resistor) and can see 3 dBvac of squeezing with current noise of about 5 pA/rtHz at 100 Hz (2.5 kΩ series resistor). At this point it will be difficult to control the optics however.

So it seems reasonable to reduce the DAC noise to sufficient levels to observe squeezing, but we will need to think about the controls problem more.

Gautam and I redid our calculations, and the updated plot of squeezing as a function of DAC current noise per coil is shown in the attachment. The current noise is calculated as the maximum of the filtered DAC noise and the Johnson noise of the series resistor. The total noise is for four optics with four coils each.

The numbers are worse than we quoted before: according to these calculations we can get to 0 dBvac for current noise per coil of about 2.4 pA/rtHz at 100 Hz.

I have been looking into whether we can observe squeezing on a short timescale. The simulations I show here say that we can get 2 dBvac of squeezing at about 120 Hz using extreme signal recycling.

The parameters used here are

• 100 ppm transmissivity on the folding mirrors giving a PRC gain of 40.
• 10 kΩ series resistance for the ETMs; 15 kΩ series resistance for the ITMs.
• 1 W incident on the back of PRM.
• PD quantum efficiency 0.88.

The first attachment shows the displacement noise. The red curve labeled vacuum is the standard unsqueezed vacuum noise which we need to beat. The second attachment shows the same noise budget as a ratio of the noise sources to the vacuum noise.

This homodyne angle and SRC detuning give about the maximum amount of squeezing. However, there's quite a bit of flexibility and if there are other considerations, such as 100 Hz being too low, we should be able to optimize these angles (even with more pessimistic values of the above parameters) to see at least 0.2 dBvac around 400 Hz.

We can get 1.1 dBvac at 210 Hz.

The first two attachments are the noise budgets for these optimized angles. The third attachment shows squeezing as a function of homodyne angle and SRC detuning at 210 Hz. To stay below -1 dBvac, the homodyne angle must be kept between 88.5 and 89.7 degrees and the SRC detuning must be kept between -0.04 and 0.03 degrees. This corresponds to fixing the SRC length to within a range of 0.07/360 * 1064 nm = 200 pm.

Yes, this SRC detuning is very close to extreme signal recycling (0° in this convention), and the homodyne angle is close to the amplitude quadrature (90° in this convention).

For T(SRM) = 5% at the optimal angles (SRC detuning of -0.01° and homodyne angle of 89°), we can see 0.7 dBvac at 210 Hz.

[Gautam, Kevin]

We redid the measurement measuring the voltage noise from the REFL PD demod board output monitor with an SR785 with the noise eater on and off. We used a 100x preamp to amplify the signal above the SR785 noise. The SR785 noise floor was measured with the input to the preamp terminated with 50 ohms. The spectra shown have been corrected for the 100x amplification.

This measurement shows no difference with the noise eater on or off.

[Gautam, Kevin]

We measured the MC coil driver noise at the output monitors of the coil driver board with an SR785 in order to further diagnose the excess IMC frequency noise.

Attachments 1 and 2 show the noise for the UL coils of MC3 and MC2 with various combinations of output filters engaged. When the 28 Hz elliptic filter is on, the analog dewhitening filter is off, and vice versa. The effect of the analog low pass filter is visible in MC3, but the effect of the digital low pass filter is swamped by the DAC noise.

We locked the arms and measured the ALS beatnote in each of these filter combinations, but which filters were on did not effect the excess IMC frequency noise. This suggests that the coil drivers are not responsible for the excess noise.

Attachment 2 shows the noise for all five coils on MC1, MC2, and MC3 as well as for ITMY, which is on a different DAC card from the MCs. All filters were on for these measurements.

The previous measurements were made from the coil driver output monitors. To investigate why the MC2 LR coil has less noise than the other coils, I also measured the noise at the output to the coils.

The circuit diagram for the coil driver board is given in D010001 and a picture of the rack is on the 40m wiki here. The coil driver boards are in the upper left quadrant of the rack. The input to the board is the column of LEMOs which are the "Coil Test In" inputs on the schematic. The output monitors are the row of LEMOs to the right of the input LEMOs and are the "FP Coil Volt Mon" outputs on the schematic. The output to the coils "Coil Out" in the schematic are carried through a DB15 connector.

The attachment shows the voltage noise for the MC2 LR coil as well as the UL coil which is similar to all of the other coils measured in the previous measurement. While the LR coil is less noisy than the UL coil as measured at the output monitor, they have the same noise spectrum as measured at the output to the coils themselves. So there must be something wrong with the buffer circuit for the MC2 LR voltage monitor, but the output to the coils themselves is the same as for the other coils.

I've been looking into recovering the seismic BLRMs for the BS Trillium seismometer. It looks like the problem is probably in the anti-aliasing board. There's some heavy stuff sitting on top of it in the rack, so I'll take a look at it later when someone can give me a hand getting it out.

In detail, after verifying that there are signals coming directly out of the seismometer, I tried to inject a signal into the AA board and see it appear in one of the seismometer channels.

1. I looked specifically at C1:PEM-SEIS_BS_Z_IN1 (Ch9), C1:PEM-SEIS_BS_X_IN1 (Ch7), and C1:PEM-ACC_MC2_Y_IN1 (Ch27). All of these channels have between 2000--3000 cts.
2. I tried injecting a 200 mVpp signal at 1.7862 Hz into each of these channels, but the the output did not change.
3. All channels have 0 cts when the power to the AA board is off.
4. I then tried to inject the same signal into the AA board and see it at the output. The setup is shown in the first attachment. The second BNC coming out of the function generator is going to one of the AA board inputs; the 32 pin cable is coming directly from the output. All channels give 4.6 V when when the board is powered on regardless of wheter any signal is being injected.
5. To verify that the AA board is likely the culprit, I also injected the same signals directly into the ADC. The setup is shown in the second attachment. The 32 pin cable is going directly to the ADC. When injecting the same signals into the appropriate channels the above channels show between 200--300 cts, and 0 cts when no signal is injected.

Steve, the pictures you posted are not the AA board I was referring to. The attached pictures show the board which is sitting beneath the GPS time server.

Steve secured the GPS time server in the rack above the AA board and removed the wooden block that it was resting on. The new rack is shown in attachment 1.

I then opened the AA board to see why the channels aren't working. Even though the board was powered and outputting 4.6 V, none of the chips were getting power. I must have shorted something while trying to diagnose this and the board is no longer powered either.

The schematic is given in D990147. The D68L8EX filter is bypassed on all the channels, as can be seen in attachment 3, so the board isn't really doing anything. Rana suggested that we could just bypass the whole circuit by wiring the IN channels directly to the OUT channels going to the ADC. I'll try that next for a single channel.

In the ongoing attempt to recover the seismometer BLRMS, I removed the AA board from the rack and modified the BS seismometer Z channel. The BS_Z BLRMs seem to be recovered after this modification.

I removed the three resistors from the output of the circuit and wired the input and from the seismometer directly to the input to the ADC. The modified schematic is shown in attachment 1. Attachments 2 and 3 show the top and bottom of the modified board. The board is doing nothing now other than serving as a connector for this channel.

I put the board back in the rack and injected a 2 Vpp signal into the BS_Z channel and saw +/- 1600 cts in C1PEM-SEIS_BS_Z. I then plugged the seismometer back into the board and took the spectrum shown in attachment 4. This shows the working Z channel giving a reasonable seismic spectrum. Note that X and Y are not modified yet.

If there are no objections, I will modify all the other channels on the board in the same way tomorrow.

I wired all 32 channels going to the AA board directly to the ADC as described in the previous log. However, instead of using the old AA board and bypassing the whole circuit, I just used a breakout board as is shown in the first attachment. I put the board back in the rack and reconnected all of the cables.

The seismic BLRMs appear to be working again. A PSD of the BS seismometers is shown in attachment 2. Tomorrow I'll look at how much the ADC alone is suppressing the common mode 60 Hz noise on each of the channels.

Steve: 5 of ADC DAC In Line Test Boards [ D060124 ] ordered. They should be here within 10 days.

Yesterday I wired the outputs from the seismometers directly to the ADC input bypassing the old AA board circuit as is described in this elog. The old circuit converted the single-ended output from the seismometers to a differential signal. Today I looked at whether 60 Hz noise is worse going directly into the ADC due to the loss of the common mode rejection previously provided by the conversion to differential signals.

I split the output from the BS Z seismometer to the new board and to an SR785. On the SR785 I measured the difference between the inner and outer conductors of the seismometer output, i.e. A-B with A the center conductor and B the outer conductor, with grounded input. At the same time I took a DTT spectrum of C1:PEM-SEIS_BS_Z_IN1. Both spectra were taken with 1 Hz bandwidth and 25 averages. The setup is shown in attachment 1.

The spectra are shown in attachment 2. The DTT spectrum was converted from counts to volts by multiplying by 2 * 10 V/32768 cts where the extra factor of 2 is from converting from single-ended to differential input. If there was common 60 Hz noise that the ADC was picking up we would expect to see less noise at 60 Hz in the SR785 spectrum measured directly at the output from the seismometer since that was a differential measurement. Since both spectra have the same 60 Hz noise, this noise is differential.

I was trying to plot trends (min, 10 min, and hour) in DataViewer and got the following error message

Connecting.... done
 mjd = 58235
leapsecs_read()
  Opening leapsecs.dat
  Open of leapsecs.dat failed
leapsecs_read() returning 0
frameMemRead - gpstimest = 1208844718
 

thoough the plots showed up fine after. Do we need to fix something with the leapsecs.dat file?

In light of the discussion at today's meeting, Guantanamo and I looked at how the series resistance for the test mass coil drivers limits the amount of squeezing we could detect.

The parameters used for the following calculations are:

• 4.5 kΩ series resistance for the ETM's (this was 10 kΩ in the previous calculations, so these numbers are a bit worse); 15 kΩ for the ITM's
• 100 ppm transmissivity on the folding mirrors giving a PRC gain of 40
• PD quantum efficiency of 0.88

Since we need to operate very close to signal recycling, instead of the current signal extraction setup, we will need to change the macroscopic length of the SRC. This will change the mode matching requirements such that the current SRM does not have the correct radius of curvature. One solution is to use the spare PRM which has the correct radius of curvature but a transmissivity of 0.05 instead of 0.1. So using this spare PRM for the SRM and changing the length of the SRC to be the same as the PRC we can get

• 0.63 dBvac of squeezing at 205 Hz for 1 W incident on the back of PRM
• 1.12 dBvac of squeezing at 255 Hz for 5 W incident on the back of PRM

This lower transmissivity for the SRM also reduces the achievable squeezing from the current transmissivity of 0.1. For an SRM with a transmissivity of 0.15 (which is roughly the optimal) we can get

• 1 dBvac of squeezing at 205 Hz for 1 W incident on the back of PRM
• 1.7 dBvac of squeezing at 255 Hz for 5 W incident on the back of PRM

The minimum achievable squeezing moves up from around 205 Hz at 1 W to 255 Hz at 5 W because the extra power increases the radiation pressure at lower frequencies.

To be quantitative, since we are looking at smaller squeezing levels and considering the possibility of using 5 W input power, it is possible to see a small amount of squeezing below vacuum with no SRM.

Attachment 1 shows the amount of squeezing below vacuum obtainable as a function of homodyne angle with no SRM and 5 W incident on the back of PRM. The optimum homodyne angle at 210 Hz is 89.2 deg which gives -0.38 dBvac of squeezing. Figure 2 is the displacement noise at this optimal homodyne angle and attachment 3 is the same noise budget shown as the ratio of the various noise sources to the unsqueezed vacuum.

The other parameters used for these calculations are:

• 4.5 kΩ series resistance for the ETM coils; 15 kΩ for the ITM coils
• 100 ppm transmissivity on the folding mirrors giving a PRC gain of 40
• PD quantum efficiency of 0.88

So maybe it's worth considering going for less squeezing with no SRM if that makes it technically more feasible.

As described in this elog, the ADC for the seismometers now has the signals wired directly to the ADC instead of going through an AA board or other circuit to remove any common mode noise. This elog describes one test of the common mode rejection of this setup. Guantanamo suggested comparing directly with a recent spectrum taken a few months before the new setup described in this elog.

Today I took a spectrum (attachment 1) of C1:PEM-MIC_2 (Ch17) and C1:PEM-MIC_3 (Ch18) with input to the ADC terminated with 50 Ohms. These are two of the channels plotted in the previous spectrum, though I don't know how that plot was normalized. It's clear that there are now strong 60 Hz harmonic peaks that were not there before, so this new setup does have worse common mode rejection.

Earlier today Kira and I reconnected the EX seismometer. I just took some spectra of all three seismometers, shown in the attachments, to compare with past data and to do a rough check of the calibration.

This elog has a spectra from 2010 (GUR1 is now EY) and this elog has one for BS at lower frequencies from 2017. Note that the EX seismometers now have strong peaks that are not at 60 Hz harmonics. Other than these peaks, these old spectra roughly match up with the ones taken today, so the callibration is still roughly the same. I couldn't find any old data for EX (GUR2) though so I don't know for sure that these peaks weren't there before.

gautam 20180517 0930: In 2017, Gur2 (now EX) looked like this. Still peaky, but the peaks seem shifted in frequency. Steve also informed me that the Gur1 and Gur2 cables were swapped n times, so perhaps we shouldn't read too much into that.

This goal of this test was to measure and map the AC (at 60 Hz) and DC magnetic fields around the interferometer. I've attached the final products which were drawn up with Google SketchUp.

The notes on the maps make them more or less self explanatory: for each numbered point there's an X, Y, and Z measurement produced by the magnetometer. For the AC numbers I measured the Peak-to-Peak value, while for the DC I simply measured the Mean. The magnetometer's axes were always oriented about the same way, with the X arrow on the magnetometer pointing north. I tried to keep variables such as the lights constant as much as possible (they were all on for most measurements, with the exception of a few noted DC ones) and all measurements had the top of the magnetometer at about 32 inches.  The map is pretty close to scale and all the walls and numbered locations were measured out (though the location of objects and the laser tubes is somewhat estimated). I added "landmarks" in the room, which were pretty much the laser tubes, computer racks, and ISC tables.

For each laser room measurement I also took a screenshot using the oscilloscope as a means of recording the shape of the wave for each measurement. Ch1 corresponds to the X value, Ch2 to the Y, and Ch3 to the Z. The screenshots are numbered 1-29 corresponding to the numbers on the map. The zip folders containing the screenshots can be found on the wiki:  PEM:Magnetometers

I should also mention that there is no point #24 and accordingly no 24 screenshot. I realized after I was done that I had messed up the location of that one and instead of risking bad data decided to just remove it.

I decided on the location of the points mainly based on the location of outlets in the room (since I had to plug in the oscilloscope for the AC numbers to set it to 60 Hz). After an initial pass of the room, I went back and filled in some of the larger gaps by moving the magnetometer as far as I could while the oscilloscope remained plugged in to the wall. I used the same points for DC numbers.

Prior to measuring the laser room, I measured the field in other rooms as well. I have

• AC numbers and screenshots for the control room and the adjoining office room.

• DC numbers for the entry room and the office room, not including the control room. The X-axis arrow is pointed south (instead of north) for these numbers.

These numbers were sort of a warm up for me to figure out the process and how I would go about recording my data. Since they're not in really important locations and aren't guaranteed to be accurate, I decided not to map them, though the screenshots are still on this Dell Inspiron 1300 Laptop and the measurements in my notebook.

Here are the settings I used on the oscilloscope for all measurements (I merely changed the Vertical Coupling between DC and AC depending on what I was measuring):

• Impedance: 1M ohms

• Bandwidth: Full

• Probe Setup: Voltage 1X

• Trigger Type: Edge

• Trigger Coupling: DC

• Fast Trig: Normal

• Trigger Mode: Auto

• Trigger Source: AC Line

• Acquire Mode: 512 Average

 The notebook that I used contains some additional info that I didn't include in the map, most importantly more precise descriptions of where each of the points is located and the measured distance between each of them (as well as slight changes I made to my measured distances in order to make the room a rectangle; the changes are slight enough that they shouldn't have any real effect on the data).

Since Kevin used our 3-axis Bartington Fluxgate magnetometer, we can guess that we can convert his voltage measurements (below) into magnetic field
by using the manual's guess of 10 uT /V or 10 V/Gauss. This is probably ok at the factor of 2 level, but one day we should calibrate it with a coil.

The punchline is that the DC fields in the lab are roughly what we expect from the Earth's field plus the rebar in our floors: ~1 Gauss. The 60 Hz fields are ~50-500 nT peak-peak.

Goal is to build a temperature sensor accurate to 1 mK. Schematic is shown below. This does not take into account the DC gain that occurs.

Parts that would be used for this: LM317 regulator, AD592 temperature transducer, OP amp (low input noise and high impedance), 100K (or maybe 10k) resistor. This is what is currently proposed, but the exact parts we use could be changed to better fit the sensor. The resistor and the OP amp will be decided depending on the output of the AD592.

Once this is built, I would like to create a few copies of it and put them into an insulated container and measure the output from each one. This would allow us to calculate the temperature noise of the circuit, as we can take out the variations due to temperature changes inside the container by comparing the outputs.

I can also model the noise in the circuit to see how much noise there is before building it. There are three terms to the noise that we have, and we need to decide which one dominates at low frequencies.

Our final goal is to create an additional circuit that could cancel out the DC gain. I have attached an additional schematic proposed by Rana that would help with this issue. I will leave this second half for when the first part works.

I decided to see what was inside the sensor that had been previously made. According to elog 1102, the temperature sensor is LM34, the specs of which can be found here:

http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm34.pdf

The wiring of this sensor confused me, as it appears that the +Vs end (white) connects to the input, but both the ground (left) and the Vout (middle) pins are connected to the box itself. I don't see how the signal can be read.

Since there seems to be little difference between AD590 and AD592, I guess we could just go with the AD590. The temperature noise spectrum in the first graph are for the AD590, so if we want to reproduce those results, we should use AD590.

For the AD581/AD587, we could go with a few varieties that have the least output voltage drift, although I am not sure what precision we will need. So maybe we could try AD587U and AD581L. We could also try AD587K and AD581K and see if those work as well.

We will also need to calibrate the sensor, as it takes an input of 5V, but the AD581/AD587 provides 10V, which will give about a 1 degree error according to the datasheet. It does state that this is only a calibration error, so it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

I will figure out the packaging once I construct the sensor and verify that it works. Maybe we could use a box similar to the existing sensor, but it depends on the size of the finished circuit.

Quick update: we actually have AD587KRZ and AD592, so we could start by using that and seeing how it works.

Used AD592CNZ and AD586 (5V output) to create a circuit that works and is responsive to temperature changes. At room temp, using ~1K resistor, it showed ~0.3V across it, as expected. The voltage went up when we heated it with a heating gun. Next step will be to add in an OP amp and design some experiments to check to see how accurate it is. Thanks to Gautam for helping me with it!

I have attached the working circuit and a close up of the connections.

Decided to try adding in an OP amp just to see if it would work. Added LT1012 and a 100k resistor to the circuit (I originally wanted to do AD743 as it seems to be the best choice according to Zach's elog here, but it said that they are very precious so I went with LT1012 for testing purposes). When heating it with a heating gun, the output voltage went down by a few 0.01V. The maximum voltage was 0.686V. Similar thing happened when I switched to a 10k resistor, where the maximum was 0.705V and it also went down by a few 0.01V upon heating.

I've attached a few pictures showing the circuit.

I didn't realize that the LT1012 needed an additional input to function. I added in +15V and -15V to pins 7 and 4, respectively and placed a 10k resistor and the numbers make more sense now. The voltage showed a negative value, but it became more negative as I heated it up (it's negative due to how a transimpedance amplifier works).

I have attached the new setup and the value it shows (~-3V). It became more negative by about 0.4V, which translates to about a 40K increase in temperature, which makes sense.

In addition, I have attached an updated sketch of the circuit. I will need to do more testing to determine how accurate this is. The next step would be to calculate how much noise there is currently and figure out how to remove this circuit from the breadboard and use a PCB or something like that for final testing in an insulated container.

The reason I chose AD743 initially for the OP amp is because at low frequencies (which is what we are working with), a FET amp such as AD743 will have a low current noise at high impedance, which is what we have in this case. While a FET amp has high voltage noise compared to other OP amps, the current noise becomes more important at high impedance, so it will work better. According to Zach's graphs, the AD743 is best at high impedances, followed by LT1012.

For the final packaging/mounting of the sensor to the seismometer, I have thought of two options.

1. Attach circuit to a PCB board and place it inside the can, while leaving the AD590 open to the air inside the can.

• This makes sure that the sensor gets a direct measurement of the temperature of the air in the can, as it is exposed to the air. 
• But, it takes a limited area of measurement, so it could be the case that the area we place it in happens to be a hot or cold pocket, and the measurement would be inaccurate.
• This can be solved by placing multiple copies of the circuit in various places of the can and averaging the values.

2. Attach the AD590 to a copper plate with thermal paste and put it into a pomona box.

• This solves the problem of having a limited sample area the first option had, as the copper plate should have a uniform temp distribution, thus we are sampling the temp of that whole area.
• Need to make sure that the response time to the temperature variations of copper is less than the frequency that we are measuring.
• This can be calculated using equations for heat transfer (listed below).

If anyone has input on which method is preferred or any additional options that we may have, I would appreciate it.

Heat transfer:

q = k A dT / s

• k = thermal conductivity
• A = area
• dT = temperature gradient
• s = thickness

For copper, k = 401 W/mK, x = 1.27 mm, A = 2.66x10^-3 m^2 (for the particular copper plate I measured), dT = 1K (assume). Thus the heat transfer will be 839 J/s.

I'm not completely sure what to do with this yet, but it could help us decide whether the copper plate option will be useful for us.

Tested to make sure that even when only the AD586 was heated that there was no change in the reading. I did so by placing the AD586 away from the rest of the circuit and blowing hot air only on it. There was, in fact, no change. 

Tried taking the circuit from the breadboard to the PCB. I attached all the components to adapters that would allow them to be connected to the PCB. From the first picture, the first component is AD586, the second is AD590, and the third is LT1012, along with a resistor across it. I then soldered the connections between the components, as can be seen in the second picture. When I tested out this version of the circuit by hooking it up to the DC source, I got a reading of ~-15V. I will have to check all the connections to make sure there is contact where there should be one, and no contact where there shouldn't be. I had issues attaching the tiny AD590 and LT1012 to its adaptor, so the issue may lie there as well. I'll also check that each component is in working order as well.

Once I figure out where my error is, my plan is to build two more of these and place a metal object such that it contacts only the surface of the AD590s. This would allow me to compare the three values to the actual temperature of the metal, which would then tell me how accurate this setup is.

Note on the resistor: I measured all the resistors and chose three that had exactly 10.00k Ohm. The voltage detected is dependent on the resistor, so if we are to take three identical copies, I ensured that there would be no error due to the resistors being a little different.

Got it to work. One of the connections was faulty. I decided to check the temperature measured against a thermometer. The sensor showed 26.1 C, but the thermometer showed 25.8 C after I let them both cool down after heating them up. The temperature of the thermometer was dropping at the time of measurement, but the temperature of the sensor was not. This is still a rough version of the final sensor, so I'm not sure what exactly causes this discrepancy.

On Friday, I cleaned up the circuit so that there are only three connections needed (+15V, -15V, GND) and a BNC connector for reading the output. Today, I added in bypass capacitors. The small yellow ones are 0.1 microF ceramic, and the large ones are 100 microF electrolytic. They are used to stabilize the +15V and -15V inputs to the OP amp and minimize fluctuations, since it doesn't have a regulator for stability. I have also attached the circuit diagram for the OP amp only, where 1 are the electrolytic and 2 are the ceramic. The temperature is still about 2 degrees off, but if that difference is constant for all temperatures in our range we can just calibrate it later.

Here is a helpful link on bypass capacitors (thanks to Kevin for sending it to me).

As a note, the electrolytic capacitors do have a polarity, so it is important to place them correctly (the negative side is towards the lower voltage potential, and not always towards ground).