Reports until 15:17, Wednesday 03 January 2024
H1 ISC
jenne.driggers@LIGO.ORG - posted 15:17, Wednesday 03 January 2024 (75157)
Half percent improvement in optical gain via OMC alignment

One of the things we had on our to-do list with the cold OM2 was to check if there was a different OMC alignment that would improve our optical gain.  I moved the OMC QPD offsets around a bit, and I can certainly make the optical gain worse.  I think I found a place where we've got about 0.5% more optical gain (kappa_c went from 1.010 to 1.015-ish), so I've accepted those QPD offsets in both our Observe and safe.snap files (see the observe.snap screenshot attached).

The second attachment shows that, while I didn't raster, I went both directions with pit and yaw on both the A and B QPDs, and there weren't any dramatically better places.  The one peak where the optical gain poked up as high as 1.018 seems to just be a fluctuation.  We've been sitting in the same alignment (according to both the QPD offsets as well as the OM3 and OMC OSEMs), and haven't seen that again. Despite the flucutations, our average seems to consistenly now be above where it was before today's commissioning period began.

Images attached to this report