Today, we investigated the present ITF working point with the idea to perform some DAS tuning to decrease the power on the dark fringe.
At 10:43 UTC, we increased the NI inner ring as in the past days, from 0.58 → 0.62, but the effect was negative and we then experienced multiple unlocks. Therefore, I completely reversed the step at 12:21 UTC.
After waiting for some thermal transients, the ITF locked again in CARM NULL 1F at 13:33 UTC.
After about half an hour, Fabio misaligned the SR by 2 μrad in positive TY in order to reduce the dark fringe, which was initially at 0.034 mW.
Once finished, we stopped the lock acquisition in LN2 to see the position of the order 2 mode on B1 following Michal’s indications. Once in LN2, we waited for the SR alignment (around 14:48 UTC). However, the ITF unlocked shortly after at 14:51 UTC. Using the last ~3 minutes of data with SR aligned we checked that the 02 mode was still around 10.6 kHz (see the first figure attached).
Then, it relocked at CARM NULL 1f at 15.11 UTC and, again by misaligning the SR by 2 urad, we were able to reach LN3 (at 15.49 UTC).
At this point, we decided to leave the ITF in this configuration without changing anything.
Fabio settled Science at 18.16 UTC.
Some trends of the main ITF signals recorded during the day are shown in Fig. 2.
In conclusion, no DAS changes have been applied since last evening.