Reports until 02:48, Wednesday 22 August 2018
H1 AOS (ISC)
craig.cahillane@LIGO.ORG - posted 02:48, Wednesday 22 August 2018 - last comment - 11:43, Wednesday 22 August 2018(43579)
Tonight's locking activities
Sheila, Stefan, Craig

- Very often when acquiring DRMI, we have 5-second baby-locks where DRMI is triggered and catches, then spontaneously drops lock.  We have been triggering DRMI catches on POPAIR18 flashes above 20 for MICH and SRCL (PRCL is always triggered).  Now we only trigger MICH straightaway, then after a 0.25 second delay, we "trigger" SRCL by kicking on SRCL1 FM1, which is now a +106 dB gain.  We changed SRCL1 FM2 to be a -100 dB gain which is always on.  (SRCL1 filter module pictured)
After making this change, we have still observed baby-locks, but have been consistently locking within about two minutes, never more than five minutes.  This method avoids kicking SRM, which helps in general, but did not solve the baby-lock issue.  We suspect something in DRMI_LOCKED state causes the baby-locklosses.

- ALS is unstable.  Upon reaching LOCKING_ALS, when trying to lock DIFF we've been consistently losing the arms.  Sheila lowered the QUIET threshold in LOCKING_ARMS_GREEN so the arms settle more before trying to lock ALS.  After DRMI/IFO locklosses, we sometimes keep arms for a while, only to lose them a few minutes later. 
- We stopped for the evening when the COMM PLL was not locking and we could not lock ALS.  This whole COMM and DIFF PLL glitching/runaway frequency business is becoming urgent.  

- ALS Y is still struggling to lock on the correct mode after lockloss.  We reset the green YARM alignment using Kiwamu's QPD offset servo for zeroing green WFS.  Unclear if this helped YARM acquistion, really doesn't seem like it.
- I tried to do the XARM as well but this nearly caused a lockloss twice.  VERY unclear why that should be the case since by RESONANCE we should not be using green WFS to align our arms.  A cursory check of the ALS DOFs confirmed they were all off (GAIN = 0) for both X and Y.
- New green QPD offsets in Pic 3, old ones in Pic 4.  

- The ASC output matrix from MICH to the BS was inexplicably not set during PREP_DRMI_ASC twice.  We had a similar problem with INP2 earlier.  When we did execute the state, the log showed the ezca writing was really slow, could be an ezca issue.  For now, we really have to pay attention to our ASC output matrix, because the control signals on the StripTool monitors are lies.

- Sheila walked ITMY in pitch today, and increased the recycling gain by 10% (from 28 to 31).  We suspect we haven't completely finished the pitch walk, and need to walk yaw as well.

- Engaging the CHARD loops has proven difficult today.  When closing CHARD, PRC2 tends to have a strong response, sometimes running away completely.  When we closed all the corner ASC loops plus DHARD and CHARD, we achieved a recycling gain of 31.

- Stefan used his pr2spotmove.py script, with crazy results.  POPAIR18 reached about 70 and POPAIR90 reached about 18 counts, a 80% increase.  The recycling gain remained steady at about 30.  We doubt this is real, but also don't have any good explanations.  Maybe clipping on the POPAIR PD is causing and apparent RF power increase.  It's possible it was real and clipping was just horrible on PR2, but this does not seem realistic, especially since the PR gain did not increase (PR gain is just calibrated POP_A_LF divided by IM4_TRANS).  Picture 5 shows Stefan moving the spot on PR2 by adjusting PR3 pitch alignment, which soon after lead to a lockloss.  We adjusted the WFS alignment back to when the POPAIR gains were normal.

- At around 2:36:00 PDT there was a massive earthquake which tripped every single ISI watchdog we've got.  Apparently it was a 6.3 located in Bandon, Oregon.  The ground velocity is literally off the charts, reaching 30 um/s in the 0.03-0.1 Hz band.  After five minutes of looking I found the REALLY BIG EARTHQUAKE button that's I've heard about and hit it, it changed every HAM state to ISI_DAMPED_HEPI_OFFLINE, hope that was correct.  

- I restarted the HWS code at around 2:26 PDT (GSP = 1218965247), and started the ring heater tests a little later, which said they should be done in an hour.  I also started the HWS ITM PRISM PROBE dtt templates.
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Comments related to this report
jenne.driggers@LIGO.ORG - 10:03, Wednesday 22 August 2018 (43587)

[Hang, Gabriele, Jenne]

SRY of initial alignment was using that FM1, so we kicked SRM pretty hard several times until we re-read this alog.  HAM5 and all optics on it but SR3 tripped once, but SRM alone tripped several times. 

In the past, FM1 (then a +6 dB) was engaged after SRY caught lock.  So, the guardian's turning on this new +106dB gain obviously isn't what we want to do.  It seems like SRY is kind of fine with a factor 2 lower gain than it used to have (just leaving things with the acquisition gain), so we've just removed FM1 from engaging after the cavity is locked.  If we decide that SRY really does need that +6dB after the cavity locks and the integrator is on, we can adjust the input matrix gain.

gabriele.vajente@LIGO.ORG - 11:43, Wednesday 22 August 2018 (43591)

Here's a measurement of the MICH open loop transfer function in the MICH_DARK_LOCKED state, with the increased gain.

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