Peter K, Gabriele
As reported yesterday, the second loop servo didn't have enough gain, so this morning we modified one switchable stage of the board to include a x10 gain. Unfortunately, that stage is an inverting one, so we can't really switch it on and off with the ISS second loop closed. This stage is controlled by H1:PSL-ISS_SECONDLOOP_ADD_GAIN.
Using everything we have in the board (maximum gain at +40dB, x10 stage, integrator and boost) we could engage the second loop and get the performance shown in the first attached plot. The red and blue traces are the in-loop and out-of-loop signals, calibrated in RIN, when the second loop is open. The green and maroon traces are again the same signals, with the loop engaged with maximum gain. The cyan and magenta traces correspond to the integrator and boost switched on. We're getting a bandwith of about 1 kHz.
We can see that the out-of-loop signal shows an excess of noise with respect to the in-loop signal, up to about 60 Hz. The out-of-loop RIN is about 1e-6 at 10 Hz and 2e-7 at 60-70 Hz. We can conclude that our ISS second loop photodiodes are limited by sensing noise of some kind at this level.
The second plot shows a comparison of the error signals (sum of photodiodes 1-4 and sum of photodiodes 5-8) with one or the other in loop. The performance is very similar in the two cases, so the amouint of excess sensing noise is about the same in both sets of sensors.
The last plot shows that there is some coherence between the out-of-loop signal and the ISS QPDs. This is true at least at low frequency, below 10 Hz. The QPD signals show a structure at ~18 Hz which is very similar to the one visible in the out-of-loop signal, altough there is no coherence. It might be due to a highly non stationary coupling, but we're not sure of that. So it is likely that at least some of the excess sensing noise is due to beam jitter to intensity noise coupling at the ISS array. to imrpove this, we should try to move the beam using the picomotors and looking at the out-of-loop signal noise in the 10-60 Hz region.
The medm screen of the second loop is wrong, in the sense that the buttons are connected to the wrong switches. I created a new screen for the second loop, which for the moment is living in /ligo/home/controls/gabriele/SecondLoop.adl. Once finalized, we should move it to the right place.