Mike Landry has given the final "OK" to proceed with maintenance tasks this morning due to the IFO being down due to high winds. Livingston has been contacted regarding our plan. They are currently back "UP".

O1 days 81,82

model restarts logged for Tue 08/Dec/2015
2015_12_08 11:51 h1broadcast0

Maintenance day, DMT channel added to broadcaster

model restarts logged for Mon 07/Dec/2015

No restarts reported

TITLE: Dec 9 DAY Shift 08:00-1t6:00UTC (00:00-08:00 PDT), all times posted in UTC

STATE Of H1: Environment

OUTGOING OPERATOR: Patrick

QUICK SUMMARY: Doesn’t look like a good day for locking unless the wind dies back significantly.

TITLE: 12/09 [OWL Shift]: 08:00-16:00 UTC (00:00-08:00 PDT), all times posted in UTC

STATE Of H1: Unlocked
SHIFT SUMMARY: Lock loss likely from earthquake. High winds and microseism have hindered relocking ALS. Tried different combinations of ISI blends to no avail. The Y arm has been the least stable.
There is a timing error on H1SUSETMX.
INCOMING OPERATOR: Ed
ACTIVITY LOG:

10:41 UTC Lock loss. Arms not staying locked on green. Put ISC_LOCK guardian to DOWN to wait out earthquake. Adjusted REF_SIGNAL to increase ISS diffracted power.
13:38 UTC Started attempting to relock
15:33 UTC Bubba driving down arms to assess tumbleweed buildup

In checking on the reference cavity transmission this morning, I noted that it took a
dive over the last day in particular, and over the last three days in general.  Also
attached is a plot of the IMC locked status.

Looking over the trend data, it appears to me that the reference cavity transmission
suffers when there are long periods of time when the IMC is trying to acquire lock.
My hypothesis is that the IMC trying to acquire lock means that the VCO frequency of
the double-passed AOM swings from one extreme to the other.  This might result in
heating of the AOM, which in turn changes the alignment of the AOM with respect to
the input beam.  We don't observe an alignment change on the nearby EOM because the
EOM is too close for a small alignment change to be noticed.  Of course we observe
the alignment change on the iris located in front of the reference cavity, since that's
some distance away from the AOM (~2 m).

Also attached is a plot of the reference cavity transmission and VCO frequency.

One might ask, why didn't you just fix it by re-aligning the AOM previously.  And the
convenient answer is that the AOM alignment is quite sensitive.  This doesn't necessarily
fix the problem if overheating of the AOM is the culprit.

Mike L. called and notified me that there was a SNEWS test alert entered into GraceDB (E206974, see attached screenshot). I did not get a verbal alarm.

Put ISC_LOCK guardian to DOWN and waiting for earthquake to subside. Wind speeds are peaking around 40 mph.

Range was degrading with increasing winds.

There was also an earthquake and LLO went down at the same time:

6.9
106km SE of Amahai, Indonesia
2015-12-09 10:21:50 UTC 33.9 km deep

TITLE: 12/09 [OWL Shift]: 08:00-16:00 UTC (00:00-08:00 PDT), all times posted in UTC

STATE Of H1: Observing @ ~ 79 MPc
OUTGOING OPERATOR: Cheryl
QUICK SUMMARY: 
From the cameras:
The lights are off in the LVEA.
The lights are off in the PSL enclosure.
The lights are off at end X.
The lights are off at end Y.
I can not tell if the lights are on or off at mid X and mid Y.

The 0.03 - 0.1 Hz (earthquake) seismic band is between ~ 0.01 and 0.1 um/s.
The 0.1 - 0.3 Hz (microseism) seismic band is trending slightly up and is now between ~ 0.2 and 0.9 um/s.

The winds are between ~ 0 and 15 mph.

See screenshot for ISI blends.

From pinging:
CDS WAP is off at the LVEA.
CDS WAP is off at end X.
CDS WAP is off at end Y.
CDS WAP is on at mid X.
CDS WAP is on at mid Y.

Ops Eve Summary:  00:01-08:00UTC (16:00-23:59PT)

State of H1: locked in Observe for 2+ hours

Help: Jenne, Sheila, Evan H

Shift Summary:

• H1 trying to lock, alignment is good
• Loses lock DRMI a few times
• Evan H suggests changing blend filters
• Control signals sent to optic quiet down
• Evan H, changes to bounce/violin mode damping

Timeline:

• 05:27:34UTC, H1 locked in Low Noise
• 06:20-07:03UTC Kyle driving down Y arm.
• 06:23:17UTC, GRB alert

Kyle was here and needed to drive down the Y arm:

• 6:20-6:26UTC - CS to Y am travel
• 6:53-7:03UTC - Y arm to CS travel

Timeline including GRB:

1. 6:20UTC - Kyle at the CS
2. 6:23UTC - GRB alert
3. 6:26UTC - Kyle arrives
4. 6:53UTC - Kyle called to say he was driving back
5. 7:03UTC - Kyle and his car were visible on the outside camera in the parking lot

Evan Hall suggested changing ETMY ISI blend filters after a couple lock losses between DRMI and ENGAGE_ASC.

The change from all Quiet_90s to Quiet_90 in X direction, and 45mHz in Y direction was easilly seen on ST1_ISO_RX and ST2_ISO_Y, and the ASC control signal in pitch being sent to the optic, ASC-ETMY_PIT_OUTPUT.

Plot attached shows those channels before and after the blend filter change, and ETMX ASC control signal, to compare.

Current blend filter config. medm is also attached.

I have edited the ISC_LOCK guardian so that it now turns violin mode damping off before the interferometer reaches nominal low noise. This will hopefully allow us to collect ringdown data on the violin mode fundamentals.

Violin mode damping is still turned on as usual in BOUNCE_VIOLIN_MODE_DAMPING, but it now is turned off in the COIL_DRIVERS state. Thus the modes will still receive a few minutes of damping before DARM is switched to dc readout.

If this behavior needs to be reverted, there is a flag in the main() function of COIL_DRIVERS called self.turnOffViolinDamping which can be set to False.

Violin mode damping in full lock will be re-enabled once sufficient data have been collected.

The mystery ~650Hz noise reported here and here also shows up in the PEM rf antenna (in both 9MHz and 45MHz located in CER and LVEA). Further investigation revealed that this peak shows up in the PEM antenna during lock aquisition at the start of the DC Readout Transition step (if it appears at all; it's not present in every lock--more on this later). At the start of this step the ALS COMM VCO is parked at some value.

To determine whether this VCO could be responsible for the ~650Hz noise, the frequency readback of the VCO was compared to the frequency of the mystery peak in the PEM antenna. Attached (figure 1) is a plot of H1:ALS-C-COMM_VCO_FREQUENCY timeseries on top and spectrogram of the PEM 45MHz LVEA antenna on the bottom. The frequency of the peak seems to track with the VCO frequency if you take into account the fact that the VCO frequency readback is digitized into steps of 8Hz (does anyone know why / can we fix this?).

Also, there appears to be 2 different values where the VCO can be parked. Figure 2 has similar plots to figure 1, over a 28hr stretch which contained multiple locks where the peak was sometimes present. In locks where the peak was present, the VCO was set to ~78.7873MHz. For locks where the peak is not there the VCO was set to ~78.7944MHz. These values correspond with two different values of H1:ALS-C_COMM_VCO_TUNEOFS : ~-1.39 and ~1.25, respectively.

To test this, we tried moving the COMM VCO TUNE OFS slider with the IFO locked (before continuing to NLN / Observing). While initially it looked like the peak in the PEM rf channel moved as the slider was moved, the lock broke before we could conclusively tell. The lockloss occurred right as Sheila was moving the slider. We don't know why this should cause a lockloss, so this is a subject for further investigations (it was windy and ground motion-y at the time so it could have been a coincidence).

Also included (figure 3) is a plot of the VCO frequency (again, 8Hz digitization) and the CER Rack temperature. More data is needed, but it looks like the freqency trends down after the temperature rises.

Finally, there is still the question as to why this is showing up in the 9MHz and 45MHz channels (and, ultimately, DARM). As a first check, I compared 9.100230 MHz and harmonics to 78.7873 MHz and harmonics to see if a beat would show up within 600 Hz. Out to 10 harmonics of the VCO frequency the closest they came to each other was 200 kHz--still a mystery.

Jordan, Robert, Sheila