Fluke. Temp fluctuations are as usual, but the overall temperature is still lower. We ought to put some temperature sensors at the X & Y ends to see what's happening there too.

I was measuring things to see how big my adapter plate needs to be, and I decided that we'd had enough days of the HEPA being on full blast, so I turned it down to 50, from 100.  I think it's been on full since Katrin was working on the Y-green beat a week or so ago.

The PSL HEPA was off. It was turned on and it is running at 30VAC now.

I left the HEPA at the 50% level @5AM, Nov 24

Zach found the HEPA switch on the PSL table OFF.  He turned them on.

The HEPA filters on the PSL enclosure are no longer running. I tried cycling the power switch on the NW corner of the enclosure, and also turned the dial on the Variac down to zero and back up to maximum, no effect. Judging by the indicator LED on it, the power is making it to the Variac - bypassing the Variac and directly connecting the HEPA to the AC power seems to have no effect either.

I can't be sure, but I'm almost certain I heard them running at max speed an hour ago while I was walking around inside the VEA. Probably any damage that can happen has already been done, but I dialled down the Innolight injection current, and closed its shutter till the issue can be resolved.

I turned the HEPAs back down to ~50.

This is an option to isolate the vacuum chamber from the dusty 40m lab: 4x8 HEPA unit or Air Curtain

It does not limit crane operations. Here is some  science based approach to air filters

Lets put horizontal and vertical witness plates next to our arm cavity TMs just before pumpdown.

Stephanie has needed the doors to the PSL open all day, and still has them open, so I just turned the HEPAs on high. 

• Save your file /cvs/cds/advLigo/src/epics/simLink/tpt.mdl
  
• go to /cvs/cds/advLIGO on the TPT machine
  
• do make clean-tpt tpt install-tpt
  
• do rm /cvs/cds/caltech/chans/daq/C2TPT.ini (this step is needed because the DAQ install code isn't quite right at the time of this writing.
  
• do make install-daq-tpt
  
• run starttpt to restart the tpt computer.
  

In case anyone is curious how I got the numbers for the effective radius of curvature of the flipped TT mirrors, I include the code below.  Now you can calculate at home!

Here's the calculation for the effective RoC of a flipped SR2 with nominal un-flipped HR RoC of -600:

>> [Mt, Ms] = TTflipped(600, 5);
>> M2Reff('t', Mt, 5)

ans =

  412.9652

>>

1) Goto http://localhost:631/
2) Click on "Add Printer"
3) Choose HP JetDirect
4) Use the correct address (socket://131.215.115.220:9100)
5) Choose HP and the 5550 postscript driver as the options
6) Try to only print useful stuff and not kill too many trees.

To check the basolute frequency stability of the old monochrome HP 8591E RF Spectrum analyzer that we're using for the ALS beat readout, I hooked its 10 MHz reference output (from its rear panel) into the A channel of the SRS SR620 frequency counter. The SR620 is locked to the FS 720 Rubidium clock via the 10 MHz connections in their rear panels.

So, we can assume that this is a good absolute readout. It reads 9.999860.7 +/- 0.3 Hz. So its 139.1-139.4 Hz lower than 10 MHz. The +/- 0.3 is just a slow drift that I see over the course of 10 minutes.

So, let's say that the analyzer is low by 10 ppm, so the arm length estimates are short by ~0.4 mm. A negligible correction, so there's no need to use atomic clocks to measure our arm lengths.

I've wheeled the old HP audio frequency signal analyzer into the control room to debug the GPIB/python interface. The wireless setup was getting more than 80% packet loss in the office area.

I also noticed that we have multiple and competing copies of the netgpib package installed. Kiwamu is going to merge them soon. Pleae only use the official location:

scripts/general/netgpibdata/

which is also the SVN working copy. Committ all changes periodicallty so that we can share the updated versions between sites.

www.avalontest.com has fixed the 25MHz oscillation.  Contact: Jim Burnham 760-536-0191

Actually, NOT FIXED.

Eric Gustafson is handling the old HP4291A rehabilitation. Tarac picked both units up today.

March of 2008 Tucker Electronics failed to fix it's intermittent ~25MHz 0.5V oscillation at the swept sine output

See 40m-elog id:398 on 3-24-2008 by Rob Ward

The script for running continuous scans on HP 8591E spectrum analyzer is located at scripts/general/netgpibdata/HP8591E_contdScan.py

Give the file HP8591E_param.yml as an argument when running the script. This contains the sweep parameters: Start and stop frequencies along with the place where the plot is stored as a PDF.

The default PDF is located on the Desktop and is named HP8591E_View.pdf     Open this using okular and then run the script.  (Okular pdf viewer automatically reloads the PDF as and when a new one is created)

What the script does:

1) Set the start and stop frequencies as given in the .yml file

2) Take a data trace and plot it in a PDF.

3) Repeat taking traces and update the PDF. Untill Ctrl+C is pressed (PDF refresh rate: approximately every 3 seconds )

4) Exit smoothly after the keyboard interrupt.

Other details:

This spectrum analyzer is connected to a GPIB - Ethernet controller that is configured as santuzza.martian (192.168.113.109)

I have currently stolen the wireless modem from the spectrum analyzer inside the lab (vanna.martian) and using it for this one. *poker face*

To improve:

Get the plot to show where the two biggest peaks are located. Currently it recognizes only the biggest one.

Possibly have makers on the two peaks.

PFA a sample pdf

Updated script does the following:

1) Gets the highest 2 peaks

2) Puts a marker on the peaks. Now it looks very similar to the spectrum analyzer display.

3) The refresh rate is still 3 seconds. It might become better if the analyzer was hooked up to a wired martian LAN port rather than the wireless module I am using now.

PFA a sample pdf

There was no such script in the directory when I looked today, but I found one called HP8591E. Of course, it didn't run because it hadn't been tested from the scripts directory and pointed to some /users/nichin/ stuff.

I modified a couple of lines and then committed it and the default .YML parameter file to the SVN. It runs and produces plots continuously from the scripts directory.

*** also, as you can see, we have mostly recovered the green beat amplitudes after yesterday's FLL attack on the ALS ***

I've occcupied the southernmost electronics bench for assembling the 4 production version HV coil driver chassis. I estimate it will take me 3 days, and have left a sign indicating as much. Once the chassis assembly is done, I will need to occupy the northernmost bench where bench supplies are to run some functionality tests / noise measurements, and so unless there are objections, I will move the Acromag box which has been sitting there.

I believe I did the identical test with the one in [40m ELOG 15786]. The + input of PA95 was shorted to the ground to exclude the noise from the bias input. The voltage noise at TP6 was measured with +/-300V supply by two HP6209 and two Matsusada R4G360.

With R4G360, the floor level was identical and 60Hz line peaks were less. It looks like R4G360 is cheap, easier and precise to handle, and sufficiently low noise.

Summary:

Installing 10uF bypass capacitors on the High Voltage power supply line for the HV coil driver circuit doesn't improve the noise. The excess bump around a few hundred Hz is still present. How do we want to proceed? 

Details

• The setup is schematically shown in Attachment #1.
• Physically, the capacitors were packaged into a box, see Attachment #2.
• This box is installed between the HVPS and the 2U chassis in which the circuit is housed, see Attachment #3.
• I measured the noise, (using the same setup as shown here to avoid exposing the SR785 input to any high voltage), for a variety of drive currents. To make a direct comparison, I took two sets of measurements today, one with the decoupling box installed and one without.
• The results are shown in Attachment #4. You can see there is barely any difference between the two cases. I've also plotted the expected noise per a model, and the measured Johnson noise of one of the 25kohm resistors being used (Ohmite, wirewound). I just stuck the two legs of the resistor into the SR785 and measured the differential voltage noise. There is a slight excess in the measured Johnson noise compared to what we would expect from the Fluctuation Dissipation theorem, not sure if this is something to be worried about or if it's just some measurement artefact.

Discussion:

So what do we do about this circuit? For the production version, I can make room on the PCB to install two 10uF film capacitors on the board itself, though that's unlikely to help. I think we've established that 

1. The excess noise is not due to the Acromag or the input Acromag noise filtering stage of the circuit, since the excess is present even when the input to the HV stage is isolated and shorted to ground.
2. There was some evidence of coherence between the supply rails and the output of the HV stage (with input isolated and shorted to ground). The coherence had the "right shape" to explain the excess noise, but the maximum value was only ~0.1 (could have been because I was not measuring directly at the PA95's supply rail pins due to space constraints).
3. The impedance of 10uF at 100Hz is ~150 ohms. idk what the impedance of the supply pins of the PA95 are at this frequency (this will determine the coupling of ripples in the HVPS output to the PA95 itself.

Do we have any better bipolar HV supply that I can use to see if that makes any difference? I don't want to use the WFS supplies as it's not very convenient for testing.

Not really related directly to this work but since we have been talking about current requirements, I attach the output of the current determining script as Attachment #5. For the most part, having 220ohm resistances on the new HAM-A coil driver boards will lead to ~half the DAC range being eaten up for the slow alignment bias. For things like MC1/MC3, this is fine. But for PRM/SRM/BS, we may need to use 100ohms. Chub has ordered all manner of resistances so we should have plenty of choices to pick from.

New HV power supply from Company 'M' has been delivered. So I decided to compare the noise levels of some HV supplies in the lab. There are three models from companies 'H', 'K', and 'M'.

The noise level was measured with SR785 via Gautam's HP filter with protection diodes.

'H' is a fully analog HV supply and the indicator is analog meters.
'K' is a model with a LCD digital display and numerical keypad.
'M' is a model with a knob and digital displays.

All the models showed that the noise levels increased with increased output voltage.

Among these three, H showed the lowest noise. (<~1uV/rtHz@10Hz and <50nV/rtHz@100Hz) (Attachment 1)

K is quite noisy all over the measured freq range and the level was <50uV/rtHz. Also the PSD has lots of 5Hz harmonics. (Attachment 2)

M has a modest noise level (<~30uV/rtHz@10Hz and <1uV/rtHz@100Hz)except for the noticeable line noise (ripple). (Attachment 3)

The comparison of the three models at 300V is Attachment 4. The other day Gautam and I checked the power spectrum of the HV coil driver with KEPCO and the output noise level of the coil driver was acceptable. So I expect that we will be able to use the HV supply from Company M. Next step is to check the HV driver noise with the model by M used as the supply.

Summary:

Increasing the compensation capacitance (470 pF now instead of 33 pF) seems to have fixed the oscillation issues associated with this circuit. However, the measured noise is in excess of the model at almost any frequency of relevance. I believe the problem is due to the way the measurement is done, and that we should re-do the measurement once the unit is packaged in a shielded environment.

Details:

Attachment #1 shows (schematically) the measurement setup. Main differences from the way I did the last round of testing are:

1. A 20 ohm series resistor was connected between the high voltage output and ground to simulate the OSEM coil.
2. The test was done under driven conditions (i.e. some non-zero input voltage) to better simulate conditions under which the circuit will be used.
3. An Acromag XT1541 DAC was used to provide the input signal, to simulate more realistic operating conditions.
4. A pomona box filter was used to block out the high voltage DC signal which would otherwise destroy the SR785.

Attachment #2 shows the measurement results:

• Tests were done at a few different drive levels to check if there was any difference.
• The difference between "Idrive=0mA" and "Input Grounded" traces is that in the former, the Acromag DAC was connected but putting out 0V, wheras in the latter, I shorted the input to the circuit ground.
• Because the measurement was done at the output of the PA95, the Johnson noise of 25 kohms (~20 nV/rtHz) was manually summed in quadrature to all the measured traces.
• The plotted spectra were collected in 3 spans, 0-200 Hz, 200Hz-1.8kHz, and 1.8kHz-14.6kHz. The input range was kept constant, so I'm not sure what to make of the discontinuity around 1.8 kHz. Maybe the comb of lines that were being picked up were distorting the spectra for lower frequencies?
• The "Model" is only for the electronics noise of the circuit. The low-pass filtered noise of the Acromag should be totally negligible above 10 Hz, see here. The fact that there is little difference between the "Idrive=0mA" and "Input Grounded" traces further supports this claim.
• The diodes in the Pomona box are also unlikely to be the culprit, because with this Pomona box connected to the SR785 and its input terminated with 50ohms, I don't see the comb of spectral lines.

I didn't capture the data, but viewing the high voltage output on an Oscilloscope threw up no red flags - the oscillations which were previously so evident were nowhere to be seen, so I think the capacitor switch did the trick as far as stability is concerned.

There is a large excess between measurement and model out to a few kHz, if this is really what ends up going to the suspension then this circuit is useless. However, I suspect at least part of the problem is due to close proximity to switching power supplies, judging by the comb of ~10 Hz spaced peaks. This is a frequent problem in coil driver noise measurements - previously, the culprit was a switching power supply to the Prologix GPIB box, but now a Linear AC-DC converter is used (besides, disconnecting it had no visible effect). The bench supplies providing power to the board, however, is a switching supply, maybe that is to blame? I think the KEPCO supplies providing +/-250 V are linear. I tried the usual voodoo of twisting the wires used to receive the signal, moving the SR785 away from the circuit board etc, but these measures had no visible effect either. 

Conclusions:

The real requirement of this circuit is that the current noise above 100 Hz be <1pA/rtHz. This measurement suggests a level that is 5x too high. But the problem is likely measurement related. I think we can only make a more informed conclusion after shielding the circuit better and conducting the test in a more electromagnetically quiet environment.

I packaged the HV coil driver into a 2U chassis, hoping for better shielding from pickup. There is still considerable excess noise in measurement vs model around 100 Hz, see Attachment #1. The projected displacement noise from this noise contribution is shown in Attachment #2 - I've also plotted the contribution from the 4.5kohm (planned value for fast path series resistance) for comparison. Attachment #3 has some photos of the measurement setup so if someone sees some red flags, please let me know.

• The noise was measured with the output load connected to a 20ohm load resistor, to simulate an OSEM.
• The input signal was driven with an Acromag, to try and mimic the actual operating conditions as closely as possible (although the fast path input was left unconnected).
• The KEPCO switching HV power supplies were used to power the unit.

I've run out of ideas to try and make the measurement cleaner - the presence of the rather prominent power line harmonics suggests that this is still not perfect, but what more shielding can we implement? I have to make the measurement on the circuit side of the 25 kohm series resistor, so I am using some Pomona minigrabbers to clip onto the leg of the wirewound resistor (see photos in Attachment #3), so that's not great maybe, but what's the alternative?

So if this is truly the noise of the circuit, then while it's an improvement on the current situaiton, it's unsatisfying that such a simple circuit can't match the design expectations. But how do we want to proceed?

what is the noise level before the HV stage? i.e. how well is the acromag noise being filtered?

It's not so easy to directly measure this I think, because the filtering is rather aggressive. Attachment #1 shows the measured transfer function (dots) vs the model and Attachment #2 shows the noise. I think this checks out - but I can't definitively rule out some excess noise at 100 Hz from this stage. Because the gain of the HV stage is x31, we'd need a preamp with better than 1nV/rtHz to directly measure the noise I guess. The Acromag noise model in Attachment #2 is based on a measurement I describe here.

Andrew made a battery-powered 0.7 nVrtHz input-referred noise pre-amplifier for gain of 200. That might help you.

RXA: 0.7 nV is OK if you're not interested in low noise measurements. Otherwise, we have the transformer coupled pre-amp from SRS which does 0.15 nV/rHz and the Rai Weiss FET amp which has 0.35 nV for high impedance sources.

Late elog, original date Sep 15th

We found that the power switch of HV supply that powers the PZT drivers for M1 and M2 on Xend green laser injection alignment was tripped off. We could not find any log of someone doing it, it is a physical switch. Our only explanation is that this supply might have a solenoid mechansm to shut off during power glitches and it probably did so on Aug 23 (see 40m/16287). We were able to align the green laser using PZT again, however, the maximum power at green transmission from X arm cavity is now about half of what it used to be before the glitch. Maybe the seed laser on the X end died a little.

I made a flow sensor with a stick and tissue paper to check the airflow.

- The HVAC indicator was not lit, but it was just the blub problem. The replacement bulb is inside the gray box.

- I went to the south arm. There are two big vent ducts for the outlets and intakes. Both are not flowing the air.
  The current temp at 7pm was ~30degC. Max and min were 31degC and 18degC.

- Then I went to the vertex and the east arm. The outlets and intakes are flowing.

The HVAC people replaced a valve and repaired the pneumatic plumbing on the roof air handler.  Temperature has been stable during the day since Thursday.  If anyone is in the control room during the evening, please make a note of the temperature.

Chub

He has moved the levitation stuff for his surf student to Jan's lab in W-Bridge.

Since last Friday I have been testing the broadband RF photodetector in order to figure out the capability of S3399 with the similar circuit as Matt's BBPD
We also like to figure out if it has sufficient performance for the 40m green locking.

The circuit diagram is shown in the first attachment. The RF amplifier is attached at the diode while the reverse bias voltage is applied at the other side of the diode. The amplifier's input impedance is used as the transimpedance resister. Note that the bandwidth of this configuration is limited by the RC filter that consists of the junction capacitance of the diode, the series resistance of the diode, and the transimpedance resister. This cut off freq is in general lower than that cut off obtained with the usual transimpedance amplifier which has the readout resister at the feedback path of the opamp.

The transfer function of the PD is measured using Jenne's laser. At the reverse bias voltage of 30V, the -3dB bandwidth of 178MHz was obtained. This is quite high bandwidth for the most of the applications at the 40m.

Because of the low transimpedance the low-noise level of the RF amplifier is very crucial. Recently we can obtain an ultra low noise RF amplifier like Teledyne Cougar AC688 which has the NF of 0.9dB with the bandwidth between 10MHz - 600MHz. Next step will be to obtain this kind of amplifier to test the noise performance.

I supplied a bottle of hand soap. Don't put water in the bottle to dilute it as it makes the soap vulnarable for cotamination.

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

[Joe, Rana]

Filter definitions for the decimation filters to epics readback channels (like _OUT16) can be found in the fm10Gen.c code (in /opt/rtcds/caltech/c1/core/advLigoRTS/src/include/drv).

At the moment, the code is broken for systems running at 32k, 64k as they look to be defaulting to the 16k filter.  I'd like to also figure out the notation and plot the actual filter used for the 16k.

Rana has suggested a 2nd order, 2db ripple low pass Cheby1 filter at 1 Hz.

  51 #if defined(SERVO16K) || defined(SERVOMIXED) || defined(SERVO32K) || defined(SERVO64K) || defined(SERVO128K) || defined(SERVO256K)
  52 static double sixteenKAvgCoeff[9] = {1.9084759e-12,
  53                                      -1.99708675982420, 0.99709029700517, 2.00000005830747, 1.00000000739582,
  54                                      -1.99878510620232, 0.99879373895648, 1.99999994169253, 0.99999999260419};
  55 #endif
  56
  57 #if defined(SERVO2K) || defined(SERVOMIXED) || defined(SERVO4K)
  58 static double twoKAvgCoeff[9] = {7.705446e-9,
  59                                  -1.97673337437048, 0.97695747524900,  2.00000006227141,  1.00000000659235,
  60                                  -1.98984125831661,  0.99039139954634,  1.99999993772859,  0.99999999340765};
  61 #endif
  62
  63 #ifdef SERVO16K
  64 #define avgCoeff sixteenKAvgCoeff
  65 #elif defined(SERVO32K) || defined(SERVO64K) || defined(SERVO128K) || defined(SERVO256K)
  66 #define avgCoeff sixteenKAvgCoeff
  67 #elif defined(SERVO2K)
  68 #define avgCoeff twoKAvgCoeff
  69 #elif defined(SERVO4K)
  70 #define avgCoeff twoKAvgCoeff
  71 #elif defined(SERVOMIXED)
  72 #define filterModule(a,b,c,d) filterModuleRate(a,b,c,d,16384)
  73 #elif defined(SERVO5HZ)
  74 #else
  75 #error need to define 2k or 16k or mixed
  76 #endif

 The following hardware has been installed on rack 1X9;

• KEPCO high voltage power supply (kept in a plastic box at the bottom of the rack, with the 3m SMA cable carrying 100V running along the inside side wall of the rack). The HV supply has not been connected to the driver board yet.
• AI board D000186 installed in top eurocrate. The board does not seem to fit snugly into the slot, so I used a longish screw to bolt the front panel to the eurocrate.
• PZT driver board D980323 installed in top eurocrate adjacent to the AI board.
• Six 11m SMB-LEMO cables have been laid out from 1X9 to the endtable. I have connected these to the PZT driver board, but the other end (to the PZTs) is left unconnected for now. They have been routed through the top of the rack, and along the cable tray to the endtable. All the cables have been labelled at both ends. 
  

I have also verified that the AI board is functional in the eurocrate by using the LEMO monitoring points on the front panel.

The driver boards remain to be verified, but this cannot be done until we connect the HV supply to the board. 

Alberto and myself went to downs and acquired the 3rd 4x processor (Dual core, so 8x cores total) computer.  We also retrieved 6 BIO interface boards (blue front thin boxes), 4 DAC interface boards, and 1 ADC interface boards.  The tops have not been put on yet, but we have the tops and a set of screws for them.  For the moment, these things have been placed behind the 1Y6 rack and under the table behind the 1Y5 rack

.

The 6 BIO boards have LIGO travelers associated with them: SN LIGO-S1000217 through SN LIGO-S1000222.

Finished calculations for harmonic distortion at each of the 10 outputs of the RF distribution box. The diagram can be found on Suresh's post  http://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:8080/40m/4342

THD calculation consisted of gather data on the dBm at harmonics of the fundamental frequency. These dBm values were converted into units of power and plugged into the appropriate THD equation pulled from Wikipedia: 

On the table, the number 1-6 correspond to the harmonic number of the input frequency used. For example, the first five PD's listed used an 11MHz source, while the second set of five PD's listed used a 55MHz source. Values listed under certain harmonics are dBm measurements at the corresponding frequency. The P-subscript values are essentially the dBm measurements converted to units of power (Watts) for ease of calculation in the equation above. THD is then calculated using these power units; I have converted the ratios to percentages.

It should be noted that as with all THD calculations, the more data points collected, the more precise the THD % will be.

By the way, the outputs on the physical RF distribution box for REFL165 and AS165 are actually labeled as REFL166 and AS166. 

 
Fast work indeed! It would be nice if we could have the following details filled in as well
a) A short title and caption for the table, saying what we are measuring
b) the units in which this physical quantity is being measured.

It is good to keep in mind that people from other parts of the group, who are not directly involved in this work, may also read this elog.