After the PSL went down, MC2 IOP watchdogs tripped this afternoon, which cascaded to HAM2/HAM3 ISIs.

It tripped because of a large ISC length control offset signal applied on the left and right osems of the top mass.

Similarly as what Jeff did on the sus WD models (cf his alog), the trigger on DC osem values in the iop models (upper path of screenshot) should be removed to avoid this kind of situations.

This could be done during the vent period in two weeks. 

[Justin Corey Arnaud]
Even though the ISIs/HEPI were working fine, guardian has been reporting errors on ST1 and ST2 of each bsc chambers, cf screenshot. After reloading all of them, guardian is not reporting errors any more.

Authentication for ligo.org accounts in the control room started to fail at about 1:40PM (or at least that was when it was first reported).  I followed it as far as cdsldap0 logs stating slapd couldn't contact the remote server; rock.ligo-wa.caltech.edu was not pingable.  So I called Jonathan and he was able to walk me through reconfiguring slapd to use the alternate server, quartz.ligo-wa.caltech.edu which is still up and reachable.  ligo.org logins should now be functional in the control room again - Jonathan will investigate further remotely later in the day.

I've swapped out the workstations located by the test stands, they were no longer useable as configured.  The new workstations, lveaws1,2 are iMacs and connect via the wireless AP.

Reading before turning it off, 1.34X10^-04 torr.

Left the CC on for 1.5 hours.

It is off now.

(Corey, Gerardo, Patrick)

Two days ago (about 4am Thurs morning) the ISS diffracted power started to drift down from about 6.7% down to 2.0%.  Once at 2%, it started to go into oscillations (roughly around 3am this morning); see attached 2-day trend.

Without instructions on how to address this (and no recent alogs noting this behavior), we scratched our heads a bit, moved some gains and hit buttons to no effect.  We returned back to the original state.  Then Patrick suggested we try switching from PD A to PD B, and this appeared to stop the oscillations.  It took us to a value of about 5%.  Unfortunately, it looks like the power is still sloping down however.  (Curious to see if the ISS goes back into oscillations at 9pm tonight).

After checking with commissioners to verify no one was performing any measurements on h1lsc, I manually cleared the test point list to avoid overloading the awgtpman process.  Test points had apparently been orphaned at some point, corresponding to the following channels:

H1:LSC-REFLAIR_A_RF45_I_ERR_DQ
H1:LSC-REFLAIR_A_RF45_Q_ERR_DQ
H1:LSC-REFLAIR_B_RF135_I_ERR_DQ
H1:LSC-REFLAIR_B_RF135_Q_ERR_DQ
H1:LSC-PRCL_EXC

The long term storage Nitrogen purge system has started testing today. It will be venting through a regulator and hose near HAM12 over the weekend. This purging shouldn't have an impact on any activities inside the LVEA. CP2 levels may need increased attention until we can see the impact that the purge line has on the LN2 dewar.

Yesterday I started my new EPICS alarms alerting system with a full configuration. It monitors critical EPICS channels and sends text alerts to engineering staff (cell phone texts and regular email). This system is monitoring vacuum, fmcs and DAQ channels at a very low rate (once per minute). I do not anticipate any problems at the IOC end.

• HAM5:  Baffle install today (Betsy), balancing table after all payload on (Tues)
• HAM4:  unlocked hepi, fixed positioning code error,
• Staging:  put an ISI in can
• HAM6:  Lab work hopes to be complete next
• ACB complete & ready to transport, CPB up next week
• ITM work in West Bay
• TCS:  Hartman need camera, TCSY--polarizer problem, and would like laser hazard
• Ring Heater stress test coming up
• ESDy improvements made yesterday
• Apollo:  Scott at Staging, TCS enclosure
• H2 Enclosure work possibly for ISS PD Array
• Visitors:  None
• PAP next week & tour on Tues

Yesterday I installed Windows 7 pro on a TCS FLIR thermal camera readout computer as a test in the CUR (cpu was installed on the GC network). Thomas provided two TCS FLIR cameras, which I attached to the second ethernet port of the computer via a 100BaseT switched hub. I ran the cameras at a low frame rate because I did not have GigE speeds for this test. Running the FLIR provided camera monitor software, I was able to view both cameras from one computer, which was the main purpose of the test. We do need to label the images if that is possible to differentiate between X and Y arm.

I noticed that one camera was not auto-focusing, Thomas is investigating.

Entered the LVEA at 0745pdt and left 0805--No issues, will now attempt to close position loops.

model restarts logged for Thu 22/May/2014
2014_05_22 15:27 h1fw1

unexpected restart of h1fw1.

This evening Lisa pointed out that the low carrier buildup can be explained by misalignment in the Y arm.

I spent an hour to carefully adjust the alignment. Indeed, after the alignment, I got a cavity flash of 45 (normalized for a single arm build up) which is the highest we ever obtained. Also, the funny REFL9I offset disappeared and I could see a PDH-looking signal there when CARM passed through a resonance.

What I did:

• Aligned ETMY to maximize the IR in Y. (CAREFUL: This is an opposite way of the proposed global alignment procedure)
• Then steered TMSY and added an offset in the TMSY QPDs to recover a high buildup for the green light.
  • The resultant green buildup is now 10% smaller than the usual, but optimized for the infrared. Not terrible.
  • ALS-Y_QPD_A_PIT now has an intentional offset of 0.8. This gave a high buildup for the green light.
  • I did not steer ITMY or BS at all in this process. In other words, I relied on the PRMI local alignment.
  • Then I did a mode scan of the Y arm to see how good the alignment is. The spatial HOMs are now small. Their power are roughly 10-20 times smaller than the carrier 00. Good.
• I tried the locking process again, starting from a CARM offset of 700 Hz with REFL45 for PRMI. This worked fine.
  • The funny offset in REFL9I was much smaller this time. It was about 10 times smaller than yesterday. Good.
• I reduced the offset to let CARM resonate while holding PRMI with 135I and Q.
  • I didn't have to re-adjust the demod phase at all this time. It was robust until the arm cavity started building up the carrier light.
  • Apparently PRMI was not able to survive through the arm cavity resonances.
  • However if the sweep through a resonance is fast enough, PRMI does not drop the lock since the carrier does not build up so high.
• I disconnected the REFL_DC_BIAS cable from the common mode board and connected the REFL9I signal in order to try self-lcoking.
  • It seemed that a good control sign is positive at the input2 of the common mode board because this brought CARM closer to the resonance.
• I tried self-locking a couple of times with no success.
  • I was not able to approach the resonance as close as 100 Hz because of the fragile PRMI before introducing REFL9I. So I tried to add REFL9I when CARM was as far as 150 Hz or so.
  • Self-locking tends to push CARM to the resonance as expected, but IMC unlocked every time. The arm power went up to 3 or 4 before IMC unlocked.
  • I tried different gains (almost randomly) in input2, but no luck. I guess that CARM is basically too far from the resonance and therefore self-locking can not squash such a big offset by its gain.

This is really the next big watchdog issue: regular IFO commissioning activity is causing the SEI watchdogs to trip.  We need to investigate the issue further, but what we definitely know is that when we lose the ALS locks the ETM ISI watchdogs trip.  It's usually just in stage 2 actuators, but also sometimes both ISI stages and more than just the actuators.  This is reducing efficiency during commissioning, so we need to back off on the saturation count for the SEI watchdogs some more.

SR3 measurements will be running overnight on opsws1.

Guardian states "undamping/undamped" were added to sus.py. It basically set the correct switches for testing purposes (undamped tfs). This state can be called from matlab before running a TF using (e.g for SR3):

system('caput H1:GRD-SUS_SR3_REQUEST UNDAMPED')

Only SR3 guardian was restarted

Daniel and I restarted green WFS effort.

WFSA and WFSB were rephased using an injection into PDH CM board. Apparently somebody tried to compensate the signal differences across the quadrants when doing a similar injection as mine, and I followed that same path such that seg1 and seg3 are matched as well as seg2 and seg4.

Then I dithered PZTs at 2, 8, 11 and 13.5Hz to measure the sensing matrix, inverted the matrix, and put them in the input matrix, such that WFS_DOF3 becomes PZT1 and DOF4 PZT2. Note that both WFSs are much more sensitive to PZT2 than PZT1.

I didn't put any filter in DOF3/4 nor IP PITOFS and IP YAWOFS, but set the gain to some negative numbers.

In the input matrix of QPD alignment servo, I added a straight-through matrix to add the WFS signal.

I had a hard time working with state definition thing and maybe the guardian, so I still don't know if it works or not, but the intent is to do a high BW feedback to the PZT.

While the Gate Valves were closed and we were Laser Safe, I installed a pair of aLIGO Camera Housings on the Spool where the ITMx cameras will be.