[Michael R., Cheryl V., Volker Q.]

The H1 modulator has been installed on the PSL table, the temporary H2 modulator
got swapped out.  The H2 modulator will be re-tuned and become the H1 spare.

The beam after the modulator was not parallel to the grid on the optics table
because IO_MB_M2 was not movable far enough to allow for the about 5 degrees
of beam deviation going into the EOM.

At LLO this problem was solved by using a New Focus Pedestal Base with
Clamping Forks and moving mirror to an off-grid position.

Here we decided to use a mirror mount with three adjustment screws and
a modified blue base to mount IO_MB_M2.  This provided a stable mounting
the mirror mount and the needed flexibility to steer into the EOM.
All IO PSL optics were realigned using pinhole 4 inch beam height apertures
to keep the beam on the grid of the optical table.

We also found that the reflections from the AR surfaces of the mode
matching lenses IO_MB_L1 and IO_MB_L2 were surprisingly strong.
(We followed various stray beams with 10W into the EOM)

The immediate reflection from IO_AB_L1 hits the brushed aluminum
surface of the modulator housing - the lens is turned slightly to
not reflect the beam back into the modulator.
This creates a wide horizontal "spray" of scattered light because of
the brushed surface.  We worked around this problem by placing a dog
clamp beside the EOM aperture. See picture (dog_clamp_and_beam_dump.jpg),
this works, but is certainly not a permanent solution.

The next beam we blocked was a reflection from IO_MB_L2 partially hitting
the rim of IO_MB_L1 and partially going trough hitting the dog clamp
area.  See the razor blade dump roughly in the center of the dog clamp
picture.

Another beam we blocked was going towards IO_MB_L2, see (L2_dump.jpg).
(At the time of writing this we are not sure anymore if this beam was
already blocked by the dump in front of IO_MB_L1, this needs
verification).

Finally we placed a razor blade dump close to IO_MB_M3 to catch the
wrong polarization in the separated beam coming from the modulator
crystal.  See picture (wrong_pol_bd.jpg)

Sideband strength and RFAM will be reported in a separate log entries.

35W beam

We briefly transitioned to high power yesteday for IO work. While transitioning I forgot to turn off the FE watchdog, so when I closed the FE shutter the laser tripped, which is the discontinuity you see.

- HAM 2 alignment - Jason
- HAM ISI transfer functions - Hugo
- Reclean Optics table lab - Terry
- Connecting H2 ITMY Ring Heater Cables - Fil
- HAM 3 : Doug & Jason
- HAM 6 leak checking - Kyle & 2:45 to 2:55
- RFAM measurements - Michael & Volker

Pulled H2 Ring Heater Cable from BSC8 along Y-Arm to H2 PEM/TCS Rack. Ring Heater Chassis power is connected, but unit was left off. IO Chassis still needs work, missing ADC card. Work was done around 10-11 am. Bram/Hugo/Control room was notified prior to start of work.

Bubba and I went walk-about in the LVEA. There is a chamber cleanroom in place over HAM 5/6. There is an iLIGO garbing room on the south side of the chambers and an aLIGO garbing/staging cleanroom on the north side. As far as cleanroom positioning goes, we are in good shape for a HAM install next week. (I forgot to check the sock situation but I'll follow-up tomorrow.) 

Cheryl and I went down to Xend and removed the ETM from the SUS Cage and put it in a cake tin. Cheryl returned the cake tin to the corner station Optics Lab.

The Apollo crew removed the passive SEI stack from the chamber, then shimmed it and wrapped it for short-term storage. It is sitting on the near-side termination slab with CAUTION tape around it.

Apollo will continue to stage for ICC.

At EY, I checked the voltages on  the laser controller diagnostic cable (H2:ISC_WSCBSC_81), which runs from the Laser controller to the Backhoff interface chassis. They seem to be possible so I connected it up to the Beckhoff chassis. Now we have more meaningfull values on the ALS_CUST_LASER.adl screen.

The attached is the latest transfer function measurements taken on H1 SUS PR2 SAGM1 stage.  The data was taken 07-29-2012 and is plotted with the predicted model and a previous measurement from the metal build in the Staging Building.  The pdfs are committed to the SUS SVN under:
'~/sus/trunk/HSTS/Common/Data/allhstss_2012-07-29_*'

Data committed in:
'~/sus/trunk/HSTS/H1/PR2/SAGM1/Data/2012-07-29_H1SUSPR2_M1_WhiteNoise_*DoF*_0p1to50Hz.txt'

DTT templates used had the same name but with an "xml" extension.

[Elli, Bram, Alberto]

Yesterday we intentially unlocked the ALS PLL to do some work with the reference cavity in the optics lab. Later on, when we locked it again, the beat note ampltide was much smaller than before. At the common mode board monitor output it was -60 dBm vs ~-30 dBm that we had before. (The board monitor output is about 20 dB smaller than the actual RF beat amplitude).

We managed to bring it back to -25 dBm by realigning the fiber output. We also lightly reduced the power of the local oscillator's beam to suppress higher harmonics in the signal.

Alberto, Bram

The arm has been locked since 20:00 local time.

Due to the RFM not working iwrote a littel Perl script which reads the  H2:ISC-ALS_EY_ETM_LONG_OUTPUT and writes it in H2:HPI-ETMY_ISCPF_LONG_OFFSET to get the communication between the ISC modle and the ETMY HEPI model going. It runs in a terminal window.

We ran a sine response function at 10 mHz, which pushed ETMY HEPI at _ISO_Y_EXC and recorded the _BLEND_IPS_Y_IN1 and in the ISC model the _ETM_LONG_OUT. The ETM_LONG_OUT ratio was 0.44 at -180 degrees. We wanted the UGF at 1 mHz, so we set it to +0.2 (~6dB less). The filter is an intergrator (pole at 0) in _EY_ARM_LONG FM1 and there is a cutoff with two complex poles at 100 mHz in EY_ETM_LONG in FM1. There is a 1x1 matrix between the ARM_LONG and ETM_LONG. In the EY_ARM_LONG the limiter is engaged at 200k.

We locked tha cavity and enganged the offloading to HEPI .... it ramped quite nicely as seen in the first striptool plot. In between I changed the gain down to 0.15 as I thought I saw the beat frequency breathing with a period of ~5min (~3 mHz), but returned it to 0.2 after ~30 min.

In the attached spectrum the peak at 2.75 Hz is down quite a bit, but then there is an increase in noise at the higher frequencies. At other moment, the 2.75 Hz peak is as previous but the higerh frequencies are much lower.

Due to the power fluctuations, I adjusted the _REFL_PWR_MON offset to keep th eoutput below 9000 (although it did shoot above that, but the cavity was still locked!).

We will leave the cavity locked over night ..

What a fun afternoon was had by Filiberto, Hugo and I.  Lot's of little problems confounding troubleshooting of main problem.  To start with the Binary I/O on Ham3 Gain and Filter stages did not appear to be functioning.  The MEDM button was pressed with no effect on the hardware.  Started trouble shooting and the problem was confounded by cables with missing pins. Pin 5 missing of some of the 9 pin cables that were substituted into the system because not all the cables for the Ham arrived. This lead us down the wrong path for a while.  When this was finally discovered we then had problems because the model uses the first binary I/O board and the DWGs called out the second.  That or my understanding of the backplane is wrong.  Of course in the earlier rounds of troubleshooting we used every combination of cable from the BIO boards thinking this was the problem but with the ground pin missing we could not tell. So we also swapped the two BIO cards in the chassis just for fun.  In the end we have installed 6 9 pin straight thru cables and everything seems to be working.  Rather frustrated it took so long.

This pump finally shorted internally (typically expires @80,000 hours, lasted 105,000 hours)

Robert and I investigated noise sources contributing to the optical lever spectra for ETMY in this entry using recently installed PEM accelerometers. We were able to identify and remove three noise sources:

29.5 Hz
Annulus pump that was left on. The pump has since been turned off and will be removed from EY today.

90-91 Hz
Power supply for optical lever laser on the receiver pier. We moved this to the floor by the receiver pier and seismically isolated it from the floor using inflated clean room gloves.

56.5 Hz
Power supplies on floor near receiver pier. We placed these on a seismically isolated platform using springs.

The above changes removed the peaks in the optical lever spectra at 29.5 Hz and 90-91 Hz, and reduced the peak at 56.5 Hz by a factor of 2. We believe there are other sources contributing to the 56.5 Hz peak. Attached are the ETMY optical lever spectra before and after the above changes were made (including spectra for a recently installed PEM accelerometer mounted on the receiver pier), and pictures of the three noise sources.

The 29.5 Hz signal was also found in the OAT length error signal before the pump was shut down, as seen in an attached plot.

DTT template used is located here:
/ligo/home/robert.schofield/12sAug/OAToplev.xml