Scott L. Ed P.

6/18/15
Cleaned 39.8 meters of tube ending at HNW-4-082. Test results posted on this A-Log. Remove and begin re-hanging lights in next section north.

6/19/15
Completed hanging lights, start vacuum of support tubes and spraying of heavily soiled floor areas with water/bleach solution. Cleaned 20.8 meters of tube.

Calum & Kate

Finished unwrapping and inspecting all 26 panels of black glass. 100% of the parts made it in one piece and all of the coatings look good. This is great news! The panels are dusty, smudgy, and streaky; and will need to be cleaned (this was expected). The plan is to use a methanol rinse followed by drag wipping. 24/26 pieces of glass were rinsed 2x, so we're about halfway through the cleaning effort. Currently using 3 large cleanroom tables, but we'll need at least one more for prep work.

Two points of note for LLO:

1) The following parts were packaged between 2 sheets of float glass:

D1500054-101 & 102

D1500055-101 & 102

It was a good idea to protect the oddly shaped parts, but care should be taken when opening them because a couple pieces of the float (packaging) glass had chips and cracks and these were spread around the wrapping. Again these did their job and protected the black glass (which was in good shape) just a heads up.

2)  Some of the parts are double packed in the bubble wrap. Again caution when opening.

Turning the chamber over to next group. Report to follow.

OMC Black Glass Shroud

9:35am: We arrived at the LSB after checking in at the control room to receive the OMC Black Glass. We had it shipped overnight from vendor with Fedex. It is due before 12pm.

12:04pm: Black Glass arrived.

5:30pm: Left LVEA after unpacking the black glass and transporting it to the cleanroom by HAM6. We got about 20% of the glass unwrapped and inspected. (We started with the most critical items.) More to follow. We will complete unpacking and inspection in the morning. So far so good in terms of the quality of the machining in the black glass and the coating.

One point. Before we entered the LSB we could hear an alarm. On entry the alarm panel by the receiving entrance was flashing fault "Batt. Charging". I pressed the "ACK" button to stop the alarm. It still says "Status: fault "Batt. Charging".

Particle count in cleanroom (4:52 pm): - Humidity 37%. Temp 68 deg F.  0.3um 10 / 1.0 um 10 / 2.0 10. The rest were zero. (Kate, Calum and Robert in cleanroom.)

Particle count in cleanroom (5:58 pm): - Humidity 34%. Temp 71 deg F.  0.3um 10 / 0.5 um 10. The rest were zero. (Kate and Calum in cleanroom.)

Calum Torrie and Kate Gushwa.

End stations on turbos backed by scrolls -> QDP80s shut down

Data extracted for the three week period of ER7 (since the timing system would nominally be running steadily the entire time). The histograms show:

- Tight grouping of the minute trends in the data; min and max values for each minute end up in discrete bands. 
- The Time Code Generators show nearly identical histograms for their mean minute trends.
- The mean minute trends of the GPS clock are much more tightly grouped with a width of roughly 20ns; with minimum and maximum offsets included, the width roughly doubles.

Issues:

- There was a single second during which the MSR Time Code Generator was off from the timing system by approximately 0.4 seconds. The issue self-rectified before the start of the next second. Second-trend data was not available through dataview (or at least I couldn't get any out of it). This did not happen in the EY and EX time code generators. It did not happen again in the MSR time code generator. The anomaly happened at GPS time 1117315540.

I've attached histograms as well as screenshots of data taken from Grace.

Kyle, Gerardo 

Removed 1st generation ESD pressure gauges from BSC9 and BSC10 and installed 4.5" blanks in their place -> Installed 1.5" metal angle valve and 2nd generation ESD pressure gauges on the domes of BSC5 and BSC6 -> Started rough pumping of X-end and Y-end (NOTE. dew point of "blow down" air measured < -3.5 C and < -5.5 C for X-end and Y-end respectively.  This is much wetter than normal.  I had found the purge air valve closed at the X-end today.  It was probably closed to aid door installation yesterday but not re-opened(?).  Purge-air can be throttled back in some cases but should never be closed off.  Y-end explained in earlier log entry)


Kyle 

Finished assembly of aLIGO RGA and coupled to 2.5" metal angle valve at new location on BSC5 -> Valved-out pumping for tonight -> will resume tomorrow and expect to be on the turbos before I leave tomorrow.

Durring ER7 we had 36 locklosses in the final stages of CARM offset reduction.  Assuming that recovering from these locklosses takes about a half an hour (or more if we decide to redo inital alignment because of them),  these locklosses were responsible for at least 18 hours of down time durring ER7, or about 8% of the run.  Indirectly they probably caused even more down time than that. 

32 out of 36 locklosses are the same mechanism

The first thing I noticed is that the majority of locklosses from the states REFL_TRANS, RESONANCE, and ANALOG_CARM are all actually occuring durring the state REFL TRANS, where we transition from the sqrt(TRX+TRY) signal to the REFLAIRI/sqrt(TRY) signal. They are not recognized by the gaurdian because we had some long sleeps in the guardian durring these steps.  This is bad because we risk ringing up suspension modes we we loose lock but the guardian doesn't recognize it.  I've removed sleeps from REFL_TRANS and RESONANCE and replaced them with timers.  

33 of these locklosses all happen within a second or so of the end of the ramp from TR CARM to REFL 9/sqrt(TRY), although sometimes before and sometimes after.  The remaining 4 happen latter, I have not investigated them.

Alignment is a factor 

,

In this plot the build ups durring transitions that result in lockloss are in red, sucsessfull locks are in blue.  I took means of the build in the first 10 seconds of this data (before any of the locklosses happened), and made histograms of sucsefull vs unsucsesfull attempts at transisioning.  Here is an example for AS 90:

We do not suceed when POP18 was below 124 uW and AS90 is below 1275 counts; 12 of the locklosses fit into this category.  A completely different set of 10 locklosses occured when REFL DC was above 6.5 mW at the begining of the attempt.   

Bounce and Roll modes are not a factor

This plot shows that there is no apparent relationship between how rung up the bounce and roll modes are and locklosses, which had been one of our theories for why we were failing in this transition.  

Radiation Pressure causes PItch motion at quad resonance

What is happening durring this transition is that radiation pressure moves the test masses in pitch.  If our beams are not well centered on the test masses the light builiding up in the arms produces a radiation pressure torque on the masses.  Since we are not yet on resonance in the arms, the radiation pressure can vary linearly with cavity length, and if we are not well aligned it can vary linearly with alignment as well.   While we lock CARM on the sqrt(TRX+TRY) signal, the power in the arms is kept constant, so we have no instability.  As soon as we transition to REFL 9 the power in the arms can fluctuate more, causing the optics to swing at the main pitch resonances of the quads.  

This is not obvious if you are looking at locklosses, since it mostly appears that the pitch of the optics is a result of the lockloss.  Attached is a plot of 35 sucsesfull transitions, showing sqrt(TRX+TRY) and the pitch of the three test masses that had functional optical levers durring ER7. All of these signals are rescaled and the mean of the oplev signals from the first 10 seconds is removed.  From about 10 to 15 seconds the input matrix is ramping, and the carm offset is ramped down starting around 15 to 16 seconds.  You can see that the oplev motion is well correlated with fluctuations in TR CARM, and that the oplevs move up in pitch as the CARM offset is reduced to zero.  

  In April we starting using oplev damping loops to avoid this type of lockloss, that was in use durring ER7, but this isn't enough to prevent the locklosses reliably.  Right now I am inclined to think this is the main problem with this transition.  

A few ideas for improving things:

• Make the transition faster. We are curently using a 5 second ramp to change the error signals and a 5 second ramp to reduce the CARM offset to 0 after we transition, both of these could probably be much faster, allowing us to zoom through the transition without enough time to ring up the pitch mode.
• We could try moving the transition to a smaller CARM offset.  When we get closer to resonance, the transmitted arm power will vary less with arm length fluctuations. This means it will become a less reliable locking signal, but it might be that we could get away with going closer than we are now. 
• We could try engaging more ASC loops durring the CARM offset reduction, to get a consistent alignment when we arrive at this transition.  The ITM QPD loops could possibly be turned on earlier, we should be able to turn them on as soon as we move the CARM signal to sqrt(TRX+TRY), at this point we are still running all DRMI ASC loops.  
• we can have the gaurdian check AS 90 and REFL DC before doing the transition, this would have identified about 60% of the times when the transitions were not going to suceed durring ER7.  
• we should not be waiting for the bounce modes to be damped in earlier states of the CARM offset reduction.  While waiting for bounce to be damped the IFO can become misalinged making lockloss durring the transition more likely. We have sucsesfull transitioned with the bounce mode rung up to about 10^-11 m/rt Hz,  and we can transition to DC readout once it is below about 10^-13 m/rt Hz.  

I used Sheila's matlab script to plot PR3 Pitch as a function of IFO power.

The plots are from 12 days of data ending June 14th at 17:45UTC.  This includes locks at 17W and 24W.

Locked  = 'in lock, high power' 

Data are locks with input power between 17W and 18W, or locks at 24W or more.

Unlocked = 'low power, locked or unlocked'

Data are from input power less that 3W.

PR3 Pitch position is unchanged locked vs unlocked at 3W.

I removed other data points as transitional power states.

First plot: PR3_PIT_IFO17W.png

Locked pitch position is distributed around -2.8urad.

Unlocked pitch position is distributed around -1.4urad.

Difference = -1.4urad

Second plot: PR3_PIT_IFO24W.png

Locked pitch position is distributed around -3.2urad.

Unlocked pitch position is distributed around -1.4urad.

Difference = -1.8urad

Summary:

The PR3 Pitch position in-lock is changing with the change IFO power.

Nutsinee & Hugh

The Counter weights on top of the WHAM6 ISI Optical Table expected to interfer with Shroud work have been removed.  They are staged under the Support Tubes, on Stage0, and in the Spool at the Septum--Do be mindful of them and apologies for not spending more effort to get them out of the way.

The Five Cables attached to the OMC have been disconnected.  The Cables are mark with foil, 1 2 & 3 strips and 1 & 2 strips bottom to top for the 3 on the -X side and for the 2 on the +X side of the OMC.  They are coiled up, not that neatly, with the three together on the +Y side and the two together on the -Y side.  Note that one of the 3 attached on the -X side comes from the -Y side of the table, the other two attached to the -X side of the OMC come from the +Y side of the table.  The two cables attached on the +X side of the OMC come from the -Y side of the table. See first four attachments.

The M8 Mirror between the OMC and OM3 was removed, and bagged.  I scrounged a narrow dog clamp from the OM3 which was only finger tight anyway to mark the +X side of the M8 fork.  I then held M8 fork against this clamp and removed the one dog clamp holding M8 to the table and used it to mark the -Y side of the fork.  See the last two attachment for 1) before any clamps where moved and 2) after the 'marks' are in place.  Other than which side of M8 faces the OMC, I think this should serve pretty well.  I'm sure it is deterministic which side of the M8 faces M9/OMC.  There is a front and back side of the mount in which M8 is mounted.

Otherwise, the ISI is locked on A B & C Lockers and Robert is still making measurements.

Whilst performing the weekly DBB scans, Jason noticed that there was something amiss with the ISS.
Namely that the output of the ISS photodiodes was 0 and it had been that way since just after we
performed the Tuesday maintenance routines.  It was noticeable that on the ISS MEDM screen the
reported DC value for photodiodes A and B were significantly less than the usual 10V.  Oddly enough
all signs indicated that the loop was locked.

    The output of both photodiodes was checked at the ISS box.  They both indicated over 10V output
as they should.  We measured the same output at the end of the cables going to the ISS servo card.
We injected a DC voltage into the cable going to the AA filter chassis and the MEDM screen reported
no real change.

    Fil noticed that one of the power LEDs of the AA/AI boards was dim, so he power cycled the chassis.
Afterwards all the readings were as they should be.  The chassis was pulled and and frequency response
and noise tests were performed on the board that the photodiode signals are connected to.  The
measurements passed the test criteria.  The chassis was re-installed.

    The strange thing is that the system still thought the ISS was locked.  The only difference on the
display is that the maximum and minimum diffraction percentage was quite separated from the mean value.
There was no sign of an oscillation.  Both the PMC and ISS were happy throughout.



Fil, Peter, Jason

Shiela showed me that PR3 alignment in Pitch is different for in vs out of lock, and it's about 1.5urad.

I've been looking at other optics, and today found that PR2 Pitch also has two distinct alignments of in vs out of lock.

Attached is a trend of PR2 during ER7, pitch on the bottom plot, that shows the two states.

The trend of PR3 pitch is essentially PR2 pitch inverted, however due to techincal dificulties, the plot is forthcoming.

Summary: A seismometer was buried 40 m from EY to take advantage of strong attenuation of the tilt signal relative to the acceleration signal from distant sources. Seismometers located outside the buildings may be useful in reducing problems associated with tilt.

Our buildings are tilted by wind. Our seismometers do not discriminate between this tilt and acceleration (like a pendulum), so wind-induced tilt produces spurious control signals that can make it difficult to lock and maintain lock. A tilt sensor can be used to discriminate between tilt and acceleration, but we may also be able to discriminate between the two by taking advantage of source differences in the band below 0.5 Hz, where tilt generates the largest spurious acceleration signals. The tilt in this band is mainly generated locally by the wind pressure against the walls, while the acceleration signal is mainly generated by ocean waves and other distant sources.

While the seismometers are in the far field for most low frequency accelerations, they are in the near field for building-generated tilt (wavelengths at 0.1 Hz are about 50 km). To take advantage of the rapid attenuation with distance in the near-field, I buried an STS-2 seismometer in a meter deep hole I dug 40 m from EY (Figure 1).  Figures 2 and 3 show a comparison of the buried seismometer to the SEI seismometer on the ground inside the EY station. During the low wind period the spectra look virtually identical below 0.5 Hz and the coherence is high because the sources are mostly distant and the wavelengths are large. During the high wind period, the buried seismometer doesn’t change that much (there is some change in the microseismic peak because high/low wind were about 24 hours apart), but the building seismometer shows a huge signal from tilt.  The coherence in windy conditions is low because the tilt is highly attenuated 40 m from the building. Figure 4 shows spectra for higher wind, 15-35 MPH.

Of course the external seismometer would not detect real building accelerations due to the wind. But if the unwanted tilt signal dominates over the wanted wind acceleration signal, a seismometer outside the building may be useful, and I think that this is the case below about 0.5 Hz.

I note that I first tried this in the beam tube enclosure tens of meters from EY, but found that the wind tilts the beam tube enclosure almost as much as the building (but not coherently), supporting a hypothesis that aspect ratio is the important variable. Also, Jeff points out that, if we insulate the buried seismometer well (and I did not) we might even be able to do better than the building seismometers with their current insulation during even low-wind periods. Figure 5 is like Figure 2 except that the signal from the stage 1 Trilliums is included.

[sus crew]

Following the in chamber work from today at end-Y we took quick TFs on the quad and the transmon. They look ok.

Since the pump won't happen before tomorrow I started matlab tfs for all DOF.

The measurement will be running for few hours. 

I've taken a look at guardian state information from the last week, with the goal of getting an idea of what we can do to improve our duty cycle. The main messages is that we spent 63% of our time in the nominal low noise state, 13% in the down state, (mostly because the DOWN state was requested), and 8.7% of the week trying to lock DRMI. 

Details

I have not taken into account if the intent bit was set or not during this time, I'm only considering the guardian state.  These are based on 7 days of data, starting at 19:24:48 UTC on June3rd.  The first pie chart shows the percentage of the time during the week the guardian was in a certain state.  For legibility states that took up less than 1% of the week are unlabeled, some of the labels are slightly in the wrong position but you can figure out where they should be if you care. The first two charts show the percentage of the time during the week we were in a particular state, the second chart shows only the unlocked time. 

DOWN as the requested state

We were requesting DOWN for 12.13% of the week, or 20.4 hours.  Down could be the requested state because operators were doing initial alignment, we were in the middle of maintainece (4 hours ), or it was too windy for locking.  Although I haven't done any careful study, I would guess that most of this time was spent on inital alingment.

There are probably three ways to reduce the time spent on initial alignment:

• reducing the number of times that we do initial alignment.  We don't really know how often we need to be doing this, and we might be able to do some offloading in full lock before powering up and see if that gives us an alignment that is good for lock acquisition.
• There are a few improvements to the ALIGN_IFO guardian that might help a little. 
• Last, as the operators get more experience with the alignment procedure it should become faster.

Bounce and roll mode damping

We spent 5.3% of the week waiting in states between lock DRMI and LSC FF, when the state was already the requested state.  Most of this was after RF DARM, and is probably because people were trying to damp bounce and roll or waiting for them to damp.  A more careful study of how well we can tolerate these modes being rung up will tell us it is really necessary to wait, and better automation using the monitors can probably help us damp them more efficiently. 

Locking DRMI

we spent 8.7% of the week locking DRMI, 14.6 hours.  During this time we made 109 attempts to lock it, (10 of these ended in ALS locklosses), and the median time per lock attempt was 5.4 minutes.  From the histogram of time for DRMI locking attempts(3rd attachment), you can see that the mean locking time is increased by 6 attempts that took more than a half hour, presumably either because DRMI was not well aligned or because the wind was high. It is probably worth checking if these were really due to wind or something else.  This histogram includes unsuccessful as well as successful attempts.  

Probably the most effective way to reduce the time we spend locking DRMI would be to prevent locklosses later in the lock acquisition sequence, which we have had many of this week.

Locklosses

A more careful study of locklosses during ER7 needs to be done. The last plot attached here shows from which guardian state we lost lock, they are fairly well distributed throughout the lock acquisition process. The locklosses from states after DRMI has locked are more costly to us, while locklosses from the state "locking arms green" don't cost us much time and are expect as the optics swing after a lockloss.