Today we continued the work on the recovery of the lock acquisition, resuming from yesterday's state.
Initially during the morning we could see some issues related to the engagement of the SSFS, both at the immediate engagement of the loop and after the loop was closed; to fix the former a restart of the SSFS_Ctrl process was sufficient (although it happened again during the afternoon), while for the latter there is the known link with the IMC working point, so the overall IMC working point was checked (see entry 68978).
We still could not manage to stay in CARM_NULL_3F long enough to understand what was the main issue.
At the time of the daily meeting we discussed about possible next steps. One was to check (again, as it was promptly done at the restart of the interferometer a few days ago) the alignment of the TCS actuators, as some recent changes in chillers/temperature behaviour made us think about this correlation. The actuators were checked (see entry 68982) and everything was as expected.
Another issue could be due to the glitches (and anomalous behaviour) seen on the MC suspension controls that was observed yesterday. A check about that will be done on Monday, when no interferometer will be available anymore.
We then refocused on the lock acquisition, and we observed that the angular control of the input beam was still needed to be recovered. Fixing that, and managing also to fix a couple of the handoffs from 3F to 1F, we started to work consistently in CARM_NULL_1F, commenting out several pieces of the acquisition and restoring them one by one. We could then check and reasonably fix the phases for all of them: DARM, PRCL, MICH/SRCL, SSFS, DIFFp, PR and IB. One fully automated acquisition was done with no problem.
Then we moved to the DC readout acquisition, despite the dark fringe being a little brighter then usual (but not in a worrying way); the lock of the OMC, and everything else after that, went smoothly, and we could recover LOW_NOISE_3_ALIGNED at the first attempt at 18:50:32 UTC.
The performance is not great (~ 36-39 Mpc), but there are several things missing: the etalon loops are open, the squeezing is not recovered and its shutters open towards the ITF, and we haven't thermalized yet. Other small things related to performance (subtractions, actuators balancing and so on) were not checked at all, as it wasn't the point for this brief recovery.
After ~ 1 hour of data, we unlocked and we proceeded to prepare for the next few weeks of hardware interventions and no interferometer, starting with the venting of the SR tower:
- all automation DOWN; all ISC nodes, DET_MAIN and SUS_SR paused; all other SUS nodes, OMC_LOCK and INJ_MAIN in standalone mode;
- controls of SDB2 SBE/LC open, SDB1 LC open, SR suspension open;
- SR ring heater turned off.