Dan, Kiwamu,

Some reports from last night and a little bit from today.

(Non stationary behavior of noise floor in 20-100 Hz)

Last night we worked more on the L2 actuation in order to see what noise are below the ESD DAC noise. The recycling gain was as high as 27 and we could smoothly fully lock the interferometer multiple times. After we worked on the OMC trans fluctuation issue (see Dan's report), we transitioned to ETMY from ETMX. The L1 and L2 stages of ETMY were used. As we saw last time (alog 17367), the DARM spectrum showed a non stationary behavior in 20-100 Hz frequency band when small bias and quadrant voltages (< 100 V) were requested. The noise floor was breathing up and down on a time scale of ~10 seconds. We varied the ESD bias voltage to see if there is a "sweet spot", but because of the non stationary noise floor, we were unable to find it. On the other hand, having +380 V on ETMX ESD consistently brought us back to the previous noise floor. So this agrees with the hypothesis that we were limited by the ESD DAC noise. A funny thing is that changing the ETMY ESD bias did not seem to make the noise floor better or worse -- even with +380 or -380 V on the ETMY bias did not bring the noise floor visibly high.

At one point we noticed that the noise floor seemed to be correlated with DHARD YAW -- when the DHARD YAW deviates from the operating point, the noise floor in DARM seemed to go up. So we newly engaged a boost (to suppress 100 mHz variation) in DHARD YAW which seemed to somewhat reduce the non stationary behavior. We need to investigate this issue a bit more.

Here are some time to look at:

• Undisturbed starts at Mar-21-2015 8:30:00 UTC (locked on DC readout with ETMY L1 and L2. ETMX was disabled. Zero DAC request counts on the quadrant and bias on both ETM ESDs. PSL at 10 W.)
• Undisturbed ends at Mat-21-2015 9:00:00 UTC (started messing around. Engaged a boost in DHARD YAW which seemed to somewhat reduce non stationary behavior in 20-100 Hz.)

I attach a DARM spectrum starting at Mar-21-2015 8:30:00 UTC.

(Unable to damp ITMX roll mode)

Today I happened to be in the control room and so started locking. The recycling gain was as low as 24 today even though I went through the initial alignment. After reaching full resonance with RF darm, the roll mode of ITMX at 13.81 Hz was found to be as high as 10^-12 m/sqrtHz in the DARM spectrum again (alog 17293). Initially I tried the same damping setting on ITMX, but I was unable to damp. Then I even tried the minus sign and +-60 deg phase rotators, but did not have a good luck. I wonder if this is related to the fact that the initial alignment today was far from optimum (i.e. low recycling gain).