Since last Friday afternoon (July, the 27th) we have a temporary monitor of a noisy current flowing into the metallic mass of CEB
This monitor is simply a piezoelectric accelerometer (ENV_IB_ACC_X) that we have left on a soft pillow, so it does not read the acceleration from 20 Hz on (we tested it); we have then connected to ground (the metallic body of the INJ tower) the shield of its coaxial cable. The signal increase at 50Hz and in all its harmonics (ground loop), mainly on odd harmonics (e.g. 150Hz).
During a short and dirty lock (Friday afternoon 18:38 UTC + 480 seconds, see fig.1 and fig.2) we made the coherence between this electric noise monitor and other signals, and we found (see fig.3):
- RFC is highly polluted all around mains signals (50Hz and all harmonics)
- some SBE_EIB sensors ("geobench") also are dominated by this electrical noise
- LSC_DARM is coherent around 150Hz and 350Hz
- no coherence is visible in signals coming from the terminal buildings (e.g. LSC_B7_56MHz)
Waiting for a more robust and clean lock, it should be useful to repeat this type of measure more systematically, trying to disentangle as much as possible the path that this ground referred noise has to enter the ITF
We left the accelerometer ENV_IB_ACC_X as it is (the shield is grounded) until we need it for seismic analisys around the IB tower.