Hugh, JeffK, JimW

Short version:

• Large actuator drives may cause thermal drifts in the ISI, especially after a "cold" start.
• Things like power outages or long maintenance periods where ISI actuators get no signal for hours should be followed by warmup periods for the ISIs.
• We should damp as soon as possible, then do an isolate / cook / de-isolate / re-isolate cycle. Or just live with a "squirmy" IFO for ~6hrs.
• It's possible the timing stuff yesterday caused the drifts Sheila saw yesterday, but theres no evidence for that yet.

I noticed this afternoon that all of the BSC-ISIs were pushing large DC-ish drives on their St1 vertical actuators (generally about 2000 counts, normal drives are ~100). When I trended the BS and ITMX drives against their Sus oplevs, there seems to be a very clear correlation between large ISI drives and oplev yaw. I think this may be the cause of the drifts that Sheila complained about yesterday. The first attached plot shows the BS 3 vertical drives and BS oplev yaw, second is for the same for ITMX.

One possible cause of this is the actuators heating up the ISI. During the timing kerfluffle yesterday, all of the ISIs sat for ~6 hours with no acuator drive. The control room then recovered all of the platforms and proceeded to start aligning the interferometer, so the ISIs went from a "cold", immediately to an aligned state. Arnaud found a similar effect at LLO,  where large ISI tidal drives caused angular drift during locks, when LLO tried offloading tidal to the ISI ( https://alog.ligo-la.caltech.edu/aLOG/index.php?callRep=20222 ).

In the future we should try to at least get the ISIs damped as soon as possible after similar maintenance, or go through a cycle of de-isolating/re-isolating after the ISIs have been running for a while, before trying to relock the IFO. The morning of Jul 11th, ITMX was down for almost 14hrs, but the damping loops were still on, and the actuators were still getting a drive signal. When the ISI was re-isolated, the oplev didn't see any appreciable drift over the next several hours (see third plot). Similarly, sometime before the commissioners start locking tomorrow, all the BSCs should be taken down to damped and then re-isolated.

We also considered that something in the timing system could have been responsible, but were unable to find anything to support that. None of the timing signals we looked at showed anything like the drift we saw in the ISIs. We also saw a similar alignment drift after the June power outage, that would seem to support a thermal drift over a some timing shenanigans.