Today Jenne turned on the CO2 annular beam. Slowly ramped from 0.1W to 1W. Yet to see if this has improved our POP RF18 signal. CO2Y laser was aligned using HWS in alog62384.
I have started a ring heater test from 8pm to 11pm on ITMX for 0.5W on zotws19 controls tmux. The IFO will be left with DOWN requested by the commissioners but if it is still locked this should give us data on whether heating the outside of ITMX will help us. Feel free to turn the ring heater on sooner when packing up for the evening (medm > tcs > x-arm ringheater > SETUPPERPOWER and SETLOWERPOWER).
Jenne turned off the annular heater as we saw the POP18 signal decrease over time. We switched over to central heating.
I don't have any good conclusion from the CO2 Y other than I really should have waited longer before bothering to try anything.
As Elenna wrote, the annular CO2Y seemed to be not so great. The central heating seemed okay for POP18, but not especially excellent for any other of the buildups. So, I turned it off.
In the attached buildups plot, the lowest panel you can see that just after -1hr40m we go up from 2W input power, so really all of this time has our usual thermalization going on. In that same lower panel you can see the amount of CO2Y that I'm sending toward the various masks. The first time we send in CO2 power it's with the annular heating. While there was no power going in I switched the masks, and so the second time is with central heating.
I think it'll be interesting to see Camilla's ring heater test on ITMX later. Also, just so the IFO has plenty of time to really get thermalized before that, I'm not going to turn it on earlier. I'm going to let it come on at 8pm as Camilla had set it.
We lost lock before the ITMX ring heater test started last week.
I've attached plots of the buildups while we were testing with CO2Y as Jenne described. We found neither the CO2Y with annular or central mask installed increased all the buildups. This was with 55W IMC input. Also are attached are the same channels earlier in the day with 50W input.