Elli and Stefan showed in aLOG 20827 that the signals measured by AS 36 WFS for SRM and BS alignment appeared to be strongly dependent on the power circulating in the interferometer. This was apparently not seen to be the case in L1. As a result, I've been looking at the AS 36 sensing with a Finesse model (L1300231), to see if this variability is reproducible in simulation, and also to see what other IFO variables can affect this variability.
In the past when looking for differences between L1 and H1 length sensing (for the SRC in particular), the mode matching of the SRC has come up as a likely candidate. This is mainly because of the relatively large uncertainties in the SR3 mirror RoC combined with the strong dependence of the SRC mode on the SR3 RoC. I thought this would therefore be a good place to start when looking at the alignment sensors at the AS port. I don't expect the SR3 RoC to be very dependent on IFO power, but having a larger SR3 RoC offset (or one in a particular direction) may increase the dependence of the AS WFS signals on the ITM thermal lenses (which are the main IFO variables we typically expect to change with IFO power). This might therefore explain why H1 sees a bigger change in the ASC signals than L1 as the IFOs heat up.
My first step was to observe the change in AS 36 WFS signals as a function of SR3 RoC. The results for the two DOFs shown in aLOG 20827 (MICH = BS, SRC2 = SRM) are shown in the attached plots. I did not spend much time adjusting Gouy phases or demod phases at the WFS in order to match the experiment, but I did make sure that the Gouy phase difference between WFSA and WFSB was 90deg at the nominal SR3 RoC. In the attached plots we can see that the AS 36 WFS signals are definitely changing with SR3 RoC, in some cases even changing sign (e.g. SRM Yaw to ASA36I/Q and SRM Pitch to ASA36I/Q). It's difficult at this stage to compare very closely with the experimental data shown in aLOG 20827, but at least we can say that from model it's not unexpected that these ASC sensing matrix elements are changing with some IFO mode mismatches. The same plots are available for all alignment DOFs, but that's 22 in total so I'm sparing you all the ones which weren't measured during IFO warm up.
The next step will be to look at the dependence of the same ASC matrix elements on common ITM thermal lens values, for a few different SR3 RoC offsets. This is where we might be able to see something that explains the difference between L1 and H1 in this respect. (Of course, there may be other effects which contribute here, such as differential ITM lensing, spot position offsets on the WFS, drifting of uncontrolled DOFs when the IFO heats up... but we have to start somewhere).
