Today we continued the work on the recovery of the lock. Just to put some context also here, during the limited time of these couple of weeks we are relocking on purpose without any TCS actuators, because of commissioning plan and forthcoming hardware interventions. The purpose is to restore things as much as possible, given that we've not been locking for four months, and we ancitipate not being able to go much farther than the beginning of the CARM offset reduction part of the lock acquisition.
We proceeded with the lock of the ALS system, that started already on Friday; today, thanks also to the increased stability of the WI actuation, we could move from the standalone arms to the beating signals and close the CARM and DARM control loops (same controllers as before, new improved ones that can profit of the ALS recent improvements will be developed later).
Then we moved to the CARM offset step, and then the realignment and lock of the DRMI:
- at first we could not see any 56MHz signal: we found the source of the issue being an unintended follow-up of the LNFS problem we had last week; the LNFS configuration was reset and we could continue (#69496); a very large FmodErr mistuning was found and corrected (~+800 um of MC end mirror Z position);
- after a pre-alignment of the PR/SR mirrors, we locked the DRMI with 1f signals without any tuning (gains, phases, etc.), but we saw the SRCL correction immediately diverge, with the already seen "fake lock" configuration; we started to study the issue, remembering that we never relocked after opening the SR tower in April to remove the diaphragm; indeed the SR actuators were quite unbalanced, especially the marionetta ones; after the rebalancing, though, there was no improvement;
- noticing a quite low level of the 112MHz power while "locked", and the fact that the SR OpLev had quite different readings, especially on TY, with respect to April, we rechecked the SR alignment position; we did find that we unluckily realigned on a secondary reflection, as SR_TY was off by ~ 60 urad;
- then, we could relock the DRMI in a proper way.
We spent some time to check gains and phases (given that the optical configuration is different w.r.t. April): we did not find anything out of the ordinary with the exception of SRCL, which has half the gain of before; we then moved to the DRMI with 3f signals, and we could do the handoff with no problems. This configuration has a bigger deviation from the past: the 169MHz demodulation phase for MICH/SRCL has changed, and the gains of both loops needed some tuning. Nothing relevant for the PRC instead.
We took the occasion also to close the floating setpoints servo of the SDB1 local controls.
We saved the new parameters of the lock acquistion (labeled in the .ini files) and we left the DRMI locked with 3f signals.