(Doug C and Suresh D.)
This afternoon we replaced the glitchy diode laser (Sl. No. 193) in the BS optical lever with a repaired and thermally stabilised laser (Sl. No. 130-1) which was under observation in HAM3 oplev. The attached plots show the improved performance due to the repairs and stabilisation.
Things to note:
1) Broadband noise injection into pitch has disappeared after swapping the lasers
2) Constant glitching and consequent broadband injection of noise into yaw signals has disappeared after swapping.
3) The RIN has dropped by an order of magnitude at all frequencies
4) The spectrum is stable and does not oscillate between stable and unstable regimes as the temperature in the LVEA changes due to the airconditioners.
Please note that the laser is still approaching a stable operating condition and is under observation for a futher 24 hrs. However its performance over the past six hours is satisfactory.
Distinguishing glitch and operator initiated actions in PIT and YAW signals:
We can distinguish the glitch and operator actions by looking at their spectral signatures. A glitch would cause a rise in spectral amplitude right across the entire frequency range. This would then appear as a white line running vertically (across all frequencies) in the spectrogram. Where as an operator initiated action would have a subsequent suspension damping motion at low frequencies (only).
We can see examples of both in the PIT spectrogram. There are no glitches in the red trace (the spectrogram for that is in bottom panel). This was after about 7PM and folks had already started using the BS oplev for damping. So their initial alignment efforts show up as small steps with an associated low frequency spectral signature.
The blue trace has the classic glitch related signals showing up in pitch. They can be seen starting at 1.3 hrs and going on till 1.4 hrs. I dont think anyone was using the IFO at that time. Since the BS oplev is used for local damping continuously, it is likely that the gliches kicked the optic and caused the activity we see around that time.
The picture is more messy in the case of YAW as we can see from the blue trace and its associated spectrogram (middle panel). The yaw signal seems to be continuously affected by the glitching however the event we saw in pitch at 1.3 hrs can also be seen in yaw. Once again there is no operator related activity in the blue trace while the red trace shows some steps which have an associated low frequency spectral signature (bottom panel). I concluded that they were associated with the initial alignment activity which was going on at that time.
I looked at whether the improvement in the laser quality has resulted in an actual improvement in the BS local damping. There is a tangible improvement in YAW.
1) The Spectrogram of YAW motion shows that the injection of broadband noise into the optic motion in YAW due to glitching has disappeared after the swapping of lasers
2) the Coherence between the witness channel and Oplev channel in YAW shows that we can now extend the servo bandwidth to about 10Hz reliably.
3) The spectrum of yaw motion dropped by a factor of two in the range 1 to 20 Hz. This probably has nothing to do with the laser per se. Probably the pier motion decreased between the two data segments.
Performance check after a week of operation
To see if the laser is still operating safely within the glitch free region, I checked the 1s trend over the past two days. The laser power has a slow drift of about 1% in a day. This is probably a LVEA average temperature related effect. The long term spectrum shows a 1/f shape down to 10^-4 Hz.
And to see the broad band noise I looked at raw signal over the past four hours (256 samples/sec)
The 4hr stretch of raw data spans a period when the oplevs were not used for first 1.4 hour stretch and then were turned on. We can see the suspension resonances damp in the witness channels.
The spectrograms show that there is broad band noise in the optic motion, but it is not due to the laser glitching.
The top panel shows the laser spectrogram and it does not show any broadband noise.
Conclusion:
The laser is performing well, without glitches. All the action we see in the Pitch and Yaw is associated with either human intervention or lock loss events which have kicked the optic.
After looking at the oplev spectra with the OL damping loops on and off, I turned down the yaw gain from 650 ct/ct to 500 ct/ct to reduce the amount of extra noise injected between 1 and 10 Hz. The pitch gain is still 300 ct/ct.
In the attached plot, blue is the spectrum without damping, and red is the spectrum with the new damping gain.
