TITLE: 09/03 Day Shift: 1430-2330 UTC (0730-1630 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Commissioning
INCOMING OPERATOR: Ibrahim
SHIFT SUMMARY:
Today Most of the work that was focused on Rai gunning (named after Rainer Weiss) ETMX with ions throught the vacuum system to "discharge/dislodge" it. 
Tranfer function measurements are still being ran... I don't want to put too much hope in writting, but things look "good so far".

There was some SPI calibration measurments made today by the SPI team.
Also some PRMI measurements were done as well.

The day was pock marked with quakes coming down from the Aleutians. 

VAC Alarms were common and expected today.


LOG:

Gerardo, Jordan, Rahul, Richrad, Daniel

We attempted a test mass discharging at 10:45AM. During the preparation everything was working fine with decent ion production. Once we opened the valve to let ionized air into the vacuum the electrometer readback dropped to zero. We stopped at 0.33 Torr. After swapping the controller we concluded that the ionizer probably broke and we needed to replace it with a spare. It is unclear if the injected air was ionized at all, or if the TMDS broke before we opened the valve. In any case, an early SUS measurement indicated that we were unstuck!

We decided to continue with the TMDS swap and run another cycle in the afternoon. This one worked as expected and we stopped at 7.9 Torr. The included docs show the log.

On Tuesday when we measured dark noise of the QPDs we noticed what we think is some excess noise on QPD A.

First I checked the voltage on QPD A and B (we think thise dark noise spectra looks ok but I wanted to compare) with the light unshuttered and measured around 7 V Dc for each quadrant on QPD B and 6V per quandrant for QPDA.

With the shutter closed I looked at quadrant 1 on QPD B and then each quadrant on QPDA ( I used channel 1 and 2 for the opposite sign legs of the quadrants between qpd A and qpd B).

QPDB Q1 shows random noise which is a similar level to noise on QPDA Q1,2,3,4. I don't think any of these show an oscillation large enough to be the op-amp in the TIA oscillating. I also unplugged the input signal to the chassis and the noise on Q2 did not really change.

Summary: It's probably not the op-amps oscillating in the TIA chassis. Investigations ongoing.

J. Kissel

After tuning up an excitation with color that roughly matches the shape of the quiescent HAM2 and HAM3 displacement, I drove ISI HAM2 and ISI HAM3 in X as a calibration run for H1SPIH23. I'll process and post the results and conclusions tomorrow. 

MEASUREMENT CONFIG NOTES:
Input Mode Cleaner was LOCKED, but no IFO.

The SPI 
   - QPDs were well centered, with their latest calibration installed. Their normalized spot positions remained well below 0.1 [V/V] throughout the excitation. QPDA's dark noise is still terrible; that hasn't yet been resolved. QPDB should be functioning as normal.
   - MEAS and REF IFOs had their nominal contrast of ~75% and 100% respectively, and they remained as such all throughout the excitation.
   - phase unwrapper algo was reset prior to each measurement run to be sure.

HAM ISIs were isolated the entire time, with sensor correction ON. HAM3 was using the CRS in RY.
Blend configurations are screenshotted and attached.

All Suspensions in HAM2 and HAM3 were DAMPED and aligned. PR3 had its Estimators L, P, and Y ON.

(big big 6.something EQ at 11:23 UTC in Alaska / Alutians)
Reference Time  2026-09-03 17:09:49 UTC 
HAM2 excitation 2026-09-03 18:34:14 UTC - 18:58:09 UTC
HAM3 excitation 2026-09-03 18:59:31 UTC - 19:23:26 UTC

Excitation parameters and frequency dependence attached in the screenshots.
Used the same exact excitation for both platforms.
excitation bandwidth was from 0.005 to 200 Hz, but I rolled off the excitation band at either end with a 5th order elliptic with corners at 0.01 and 50 Hz.
Frequency resolution was therefore 0.005 Hz.
Took 10 avgs.

Corner station Sensor correction mode was WINDY during the HAM2 excitation.
Interestingly? Sadly? there was an 5.3 mag Alaskan earthquake in the middle of the HAM3 excitation (started at 18:59:31 UTC). That automatically changed the corner station sensor correction configuration to CONFIG_EQ at 19:05:17 UTC, then back to CONFIG_WINDY at 19:15:18 UTC.

The typical total RMS of each ISI X motion during the the excitation was ~1e-6 [m]_RMS. 

DTT Templates and results are saved to the following DTT templates
   /ligo/svncommon/SeiSVN/seismic/Common/SPI/Data
       2026-09-03_170949UTC_H1SPIH23_DIFF_DISP_ASD.xml
       2026-09-03_183414UTC_H1SPIH23_DIFF_DISP_ASD_HAM2Drive_X.xml
       2026-09-03_185931UTC_H1SPIH23_DIFF_DISP_ASD_HAM3Drive_X.xml

h1daqdc0 and h1daqdc1 "ethtool -S" stats are being dumped hourly for the DAQ lan interface. Purpose is to gather evidence for the cause of somewhat rare CRC errors (really dropped data blocks) from the real-time system DAQ streams.

Location of the files is /opt/rtcds/userapps/release/cds/common/scripts/daq_eth_stats/archive

The stats gathering services are named daq_eth_stats and are hand-written systemd service and timer units on both systems.

I retook some TFs for ETMX M0 (didn't have time for R0) on September 1st to check if the rubbing had changed after Louis and Elenna accidentally kicked it last Friday (91747). I also wanted to get a full set of transfer functions before the vent since during troubleshooting we had only been taking L. 

We are still seeing rubbing, but it does look a bit different. Not sure if this is due to the accidental kick or just temperature changes due to having the cleanroom on.

Settings:
- in HEALTH_CHECK
- DAMP OFF
- ISI/HEPI nominal

Data:
/ligo/svncommon/SusSVN/sus/trunk/QUAD/H1/ETMX/SAGM0/Data/2026-09-01_1700_H1SUSETMX_M0_WhiteNoise_{L,T,V,R,P,Y}_0p02to50Hz.xml
r13136

TITLE: 09/03 Day Shift: 1430-2330 UTC (0730-1630 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Commissioning
OUTGOING OPERATOR: None
CURRENT ENVIRONMENT:
    SEI_ENV state: CALM
    Wind: 6mph Gusts, 3mph 3min avg
    Primary useism: 0.05 μm/s
    Secondary useism: 0.32 μm/s 
QUICK SUMMARY:

Verbal alarms are showing red for Vacuum Oressure and Intrument Air. But it is not alarming and shows no channel names.
Checking the MEDM:
H0:VAC-EX_INSTAIR_PT599_PRESS_PSIG is red because the VAC team hasshut GV20 over at EX.
H0:VAC-LY_RT_PT152_MOD2_PRESS_TORR this is red because this tube between HAM5&7 is actually at Atmospheric pressure still.

Large EQ from Alaska has been rolling through shaking things up.

Today Seems like  there may be some use of the Rai gun to try and fix ETMX. 

 

[Louis, Jenne, TJ, Ryan S., others in control room]

Since GV20 was closed Wednesday afternoon, taking the x-arm out of commission, I started to look into revisiting our efforts to get longer DRMI locks.

- We locked the y-arm in green to make sure the ITMY alignment was good.
- Then we ran INPUT_ALIGN on the yarm (ALIGN_IFO::INPUT_ALIGN_YARM). I moved IM4 and PR2 manually to bring the INP error signals closer to zero and maximize LSC-TR_Y. 
- Then moved on to MICH dark (10 W input) and had to manually adjust the beamsplitter to maximize the fringes in AS_A. This entire thing was tricky because we confirmed that moving the BS also affects the alignment of IM4 and PR2 to the arms and, which is evident in the INP error signals. This isn't normally a concern when performing input_align with the xarm. Doing this with the y-arm introduces a new constraint with the BS alignment. We decided to move forward anyway, hoping that our moves brought the BS, IM4, and PR2 all /close enough/ to where they need to be.
- We moved on to PRX_LOCKED and adjusted the PRM to improve the PRC1 and PRC2 error signals.
- Then we moved on to SRY and adjusted the SRM by hand. We found that the SRC1 and SRC2 loops fight each other and run away pretty quickly. We were able to enable SRC2 on its own without it running away. Once we bring in SRC1 the alignment runs away. Maybe the AS_{A,B}_RF45_Q readbacks need to be rephased? 


Tentative plan for tomorrow is to check the phasing of AS_{A,B}_RF45_Q then move on to trying to lock full DRMI.

After the angle calibrations were applied to the SPI readout channels, I grabbed some data to check whether the SPI is roughly agreeing with the ISI sensors. I used the supersensor OUT channels for the ISI sensors (these are the signals behind the blending filters, before the summation for the blended supersensor). Screenshots from diaggui are attached.

For the differential X degree of freedom (SPI length), the visual agreement is remarkably good.

The optical lever (angle) measurements are harder to interpret. First of all, QPD A has an as-yet-unresolved noise issue, which Jennie is currently investigating. Aside from this, the results look very encouraging, since the CPS and GS13 at least somewhat agree with the SPI.

These spectra should be regarded as a first result, but not yet final. We will post a better analysis once the error has been resolved.

Note: If anyone has suggestions for which sensor channels would provide a better/more appropriate comparison than the supersensor OUT channels used here, please comment, your input is welcome.

Jackie, Camilla 

As we're planning to move CHETA IY table into the LVEA soon, we did a final alignment check in the lab. Beam was around 10mm off the final iris in yaw. Looks like we only checked one iris in our other final checks 91009. 

We spent some time iterating M3 and M4 but the alignment was strange and we couldn't align the beam on the final two iris without getting close to clipping our optics. Removed L2, aligned to irises and replaced L2 keeping the beam centered on irises. After this we checked the alignment with L1 at +/-25mm. It stayed well aligned to irises. Left translation stage at the nominal -10mm 91041. We checked the beam was hitting close to the center of the thermal PD. 

We also labeled all cables as per D2500305 and marked the top and side panel ready for attaching the panel sensors.

TITLE: 09/02 Day Shift: 1430-2330 UTC (0730-1630 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Commissioning
INCOMING OPERATOR: Ibrahim
SHIFT SUMMARY:

• ALS Y arm was locked on arrival, but there was no light in X. Keita, Louis, and I tried trending the ITMX, ETMX, and TMSX as well as relavent oplevs to figure out where the light went and ultimately decided to runa another baffle alignment. Ran a TMS, ITM, ETM baffle alignment, but the ETM alignment script could not find the PDs. Keita found the PDs by hand using the oplevs to help with reference assuming sticking in the OSEMs. This brought a tiny amount of light back to ALSX which Keita then maximized.
• Next check was to look for clipping in the POP path before the gate valve closes.
• Gate valve 20 closed at 2056UTC
• Louis and Jenne worked on doing a Y arm input alignment.

LOG:

ALSX alignment trouble:

In the morning, we've found that the X arm was not flashing and we couldn't see anything other than the straight shot beam from TMSX on the camera. There was no reason to suspect that TMXS and ITMX were bad but baffle allignment were performed for those.

We then restored ETMX to the last time ALS-X was locked based on oplev but still no sign of anything other than the straight shot on the camera. In retrospect this could have been because there was a 1.5F temperature change in the end stations. ETMX baffle script was used but there was no  way it could have worked because the slider/TEST calibration is totally wrong now, presumably due to rubbing. The script found nothing.

I eventually decided to manually do baffle alignment i.e. start from the in-lock position of ETMX based on the oplev, manually steer ETMX such that the oplev changes by (10.2, -8.4) urad to see ITMX baffle PD4, maximize that PD, record the oplev position, then move to PD1, again manually, record the oplev position, and finally put ETMX manually to the average of two oplev positions. I saw the return beam from ETMX immediately and we were able to lock ALSX.

ALSY didn't have any problem so I left Y arm alone, and aligned BS using the AS camera while arms were still locked with green. Both green beams were where they have been in the ALSX and ALSY camera.

Probing HAM1 alignment and HAM3 pico:

We misaligned ITMY and ETMY and increased H1:IMC-PWR_IN_OUT16 to 60W. X arm was still aligned.

We used this configuration as an OK substitute for single bounce, because I didn't want to misalign ETMX. If ETMX were misaligned, we knew that it won't go back to the same position after aligning it again (because it's stuck somewhere and there's always a sudden big motion after making a big alignment change). Then it will take a long time to align the X arm again.

I first probed the HAM2 alignment using just PR3 without using PR2_SPOTMOVE by looking at POP_X_SUM while POP_X centering was enabled.  I was interested to see if the situation is the same as reported in alog 91725 (i.e. the POP IR beam is likely clipped at the bottom of something, presumably the top or the bottom periscope mirror in HAM1).

PR3_M1_OPTICALIGN start position was [-142.7, -236.7].

The beam was not clipped in PIT at the bottom today, maybe due to pico-ing efforts in the past days both in YAW and PIT or something else, but POP_X_SUM still decreased significantly when I moved PR3 by negative 2 urad in PIT (PR3_M1_OPTICALIGN_P_OFFSET = -144.7).  This means that there was a hard edge about 2.7mm (plus about a radius of the beam, or ~2.5mm at the peri in HAM1) from the center of the beam according to the the right panel of the plot attached to alog 91725. This was too close.

I moved PR3 to -140.7, i.e. the edge is ~2*2.7mm+2.5mm ~  7.9mm from the bottom of the beam. This is three times the beam radius and hopefully OK. I didn't go further because I thought that POP_X started decreasing, but looking at the trend it seems like I was worried about less than 1% change so I could have moved more.

The hard edge was also seen in YAW, qualitatively compatible with Louis' observation in alog 91702, when PR3_M1_OPTICALIGN_Y_OFFSET was changed by positive 4 urad in YAW (~5.5mm in -Y direction on the periscope mirror). This was comparable with PIT situation after my adjustment. Also, in the past, when Sheila moved the beam away from the hard edge (though her intent was not that) the ALSY beam was eventually lost. Based on these, we decided to leave YAW alone.

At this point PR3_M1_OPTICALIGN position was therefore [-140.7, -236.7]. Just to make sure that ALSY beam wasn't lost, I  locked ALSY again and it was still there on the camera in ISCT1. 

I took the screen shot of the ALSX camera and put the PR3 slider back to the starting position of [-142.7, -236.7]. Of course both the ALSX and ALSY camera image moved.

I then moved HAM3 pico only in PIT to move the beam up in HAM1 so the camera image matches the screen shot I just made.

H1:SYS-MOTION_C_PICO_A_CURRENT_Y_POSITION  changed from -1467 to -1312. H1:SYS-MOTION_C_PICO_A_CURRENT_X_POSITION stayed at 1125.

ISCT1 realignment:

Louis and Sheila went to ISCT1 and realigned things. 

ETMX and TMSX have been drifting in the past hours:

ALSX sees that. In the past 3 hours, ETMX drifted by 5 urad in YAW according to oplev, TMSX by 2urad in PIT, and ASLX alignment is bad as of now.

Erik, Dave:

cal_hash_ioc is now running as a containerized IOC on the service-host cluster. Previously it was running as a systemd service on cdsioc0 under puppet control.

Its saved json file is now visible on /opt/rtcds with the path /opt/rtcds/services/cal_hash_ioc/cal_hash_save.json

Erik has removed the old cdsioc0 service from puppet.

To test, I briefly changed the value of GDS_HASH_INT by adding +1

  > caput H1:CAL-CALIB_REPORT_GDS_HASH_INT 138343157

  > caput H1:CAL-CALIB_REPORT_GDS_HASH_INT 138343156

The JSON file changed correctly.

This move is in preparation for updating to the latest cal_hash_ioc.py, WP13574

TITLE: 09/02 Day Shift: 1430-2330 UTC (0730-1630 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Commissioning
CURRENT ENVIRONMENT:
    SEI_ENV state: CALM
    Wind: 7mph Gusts, 4mph 3min avg
    Primary useism: 0.05 μm/s
    Secondary useism: 0.12 μm/s 
QUICK SUMMARY: ALSY locked currently, some SAF channels in error on the alarm handler. EX VEA temps are swinging less compared to eariler in the week. CDS looks good.

TITLE: 09/02 Eve Shift: 2330-0100 UTC (1630-1800 PST), all times posted in UTC
STATE of H1: Commissioning
INCOMING OPERATOR: None
SHIFT SUMMARY: Commissioning ended early today as well.
LOG:                                                                                                                                                                                                         

WP13560 CAL CS remove channels

Joe, Erik, Jonathan, Dave:

We installed a new h1calcs model which removes channels from the DAQ. We verfified none of these channels were being sent by the DAQ broadcaster.

The rev-update showed a surprising number of modified mdl files used in the build, details are:

Changed dependency revisions in new version:
cal/common/models/CAL_CS_MASTER.mdl : r28532 --> r35947
cal/common/models/CAL_LINE_MONITOR_MASTER.mdl : r28567 --> r35947
cal/h1/models/h1calcs.mdl : r27506 --> r35949
sus/common/models/ESD_LINEARIZATION_WITH_CHARGE_MASTER.mdl : r16336 --> r30316

Removed dependencies in new version:
cds/common/src/ATAN2.c
 

The INI file just changed by the removal of the channels:

--: slow channel H1:CAL-CS_DARM_ARM_LENGTH_AVG removed from the DAQ 
--: slow channel H1:CAL-CS_DARM_ARM_LENGTH_X removed from the DAQ 
--: slow channel H1:CAL-CS_DARM_ARM_LENGTH_Y removed from the DAQ 
--: slow channel H1:CAL-STRAIN_SLOW removed from the DAQ 
--: fast channel H1:CAL-STRAIN_DBL_DQ removed from the DAQ 
 

sw-lvea-aux crash, reboot, build replacement

Richard, Fil, Erik, Jonathan, Dave:

As noted in other alogs, a lot of today's time was taken investigating and recovering the CER main POE switch which drives the majority of the gige-cameras. Erik is building a spare Cisco Catalyst 3560 switch as a swap-out replacement.

WP13569 Guardian reboot

TJ, Ryan S, Erik:

h1guardian1 was rebooted for PM and to clear its CFC flags. No problems with this reboot.

WP13578 Add Guardian nodes to DAQ

TJ, Dave:

H1EPICS_GRD.ini was modified to add the two new guardian nodes CRS_HAM3 and SPIH23_STAT (+46 chans). EDC+DAQ restart was required.

DAQ Restart

Erik, Jonathan, Dave:

The DAQ was restarted for the new h1calcs model and EDC additional grd channels.

This did not go well.

( A Reminder: in the new DAQ, the framewriters continue to run throughout, switching to the new configuration automatically. Only the DC, NDS and TW restart)

At 11:13 I restarted the 0-leg. This caused both FW0 and FW2 to crash. We then restarted the EDC, but the framewriters did not come back.

Erik restarted the FW daqd services, noting these now have new names (rts-daqd_rs.service)

Jonathan looked at the 0-leg logs, we determined there was nothing we could do to prevent FW1 from failing, we would just recover it afterwards.

At 11:41 we restarted the 1-leg, and FW1 did not restart. It behaved normally, picking up the new run number and configuration.

Jonathan is investigating what happened to FW0/2 and why FW1 did not crash.

Jennie W, Sina K,

Summary: Yesterday Sina and I did the dark noise measurement for the SPI interferometer and the two SPI optical levers and added in calibration filters based on Jim's measurement of the optical lever to ISI sensor TFs. We also founbd that the dark noise for QPDA has an unexpected shape and so need to do some noise hunting to track this down.

Before doing this we edited the SPI-H23_DIFFDISP matrix to include the factor of 2 that comes from the fact the IFO measures the light round trip between the two platforms and we want it to measure the displacement between them, ie. we divided the first line of coefficients by 2.

Jeff has implemented a new filter bank set for the optical levers called OPLEV CAL FILTERS on the main SPI overview. See image. The output of this filter bank is the optical lever in the qpd basis. The measured calibration will go in 'OPLEV OUT FILTERS' and the output of this filter bank will therefore be in the ISI basis.

We then followed the procedure in T2600019.

• With the laser unshuttered measure the average and amplitude of the photodiode signals on the ADCs. Then measure the average signal in the QPD quadrants. Here is the diaggui template where I measured the signals with the laser unshuttered.
• Shutter the light and use awg to create fake signals into the SPI-H23_SIG filter banks for each PD. This should be at 4096 Hz with a 180 degrees phase offset between the A and B PD signals. We used a script to calculate the average and peak to peak values for each interferometer based on what the real data gives us.
• For the QPDs use static offsets in the QPD input filter banks to give the correct average power (picture taken today so offsets turned off).
• We did a measurement to check that the values we chose gave what we expected. Note the input filters banks for the QPDs convert the signal to V so these plots are in V while the IFO plot in the top left is in counts. The average values for all the signals match our measurement with the laser unshuttered and the amplitude for the interferometer signals matches what we measured from real data.
• The amplitude spectral density of PD and QPD signals is shown here. Top left is the displacement of the interferometer with no light. It is calibrated into nm/sqrt(Hz) using the equation disp = lambda/(2pi*phase) which is implemented in the H23 IFO DISP filter bank. Bottom left is the QPD A channels in normalised units (ie. the pitch and yaw readings normalised by the total sum of the signal from each quadrant) in pink and light blue. The other four traces are taken downstream after the theoretical calibration is applied in the CAL filter bank and at the output of the OPLEV OUT filter bank. Top right plot shows the same channels for QPDB and HAM2, again showing the value for pitch and yaw of QPDA in pink and light blue and then showing the output of the CAL and OUTPUT filter blocks for QPDA and ISI J.
• After comparing the theory calibrations with the measured ones Jim obtained in alog # 91754, Sina realised (SWG log #12414) that the QPDB theory calibration is wrong by a factor of 2 due to the fact that its beam is a back reflection from a mirror in HAM2 and so measures twice the angle that the ISI rotates by.
• I updated the calibration in the QPDB CAL filter banks (pitch and yaw) and also added a measured calibration factor in the OPLEV OUT filter banks. This correction factor is (measured calibration in nradians/normalised QPD units) / (theory calibration in nradians/normalised QPD units. QPDB Pitch to HAM2 Pitch, QPDB Yaw to HAM2 Yaw, QPDA Pitch to HAM3 Pitch, QPDA Yaw to HAM3 Yaw.
• I took another measurement with the meaasured calibrations for the optical levers turned on. Top left is again the interferometer displacement in nm/sqrt(Hz), top right now has the rotation of HAM2 in QPD A basis with theory calibration included and in ISI basis with measured calibration included. Bottom right now has the rotation of HAM3 in QPD B basis with theory calibration included and in ISI basis with measured calibration included.
• The comparison between the dark noise of the two QPDs in normalised units (ie before calibration is applied) is shown in the bottom left. We understand the shaping of QPDB as being mainly due to the whitening filter which has a pole at 0.39Hz and a zero at 39.8 Hz, implying the dark nosie is dominated by ADC noise. The shape of QPDA does not match this whitening filter and so there must be some other electronic noise dominating. This requires further investigation.