I finally got 93-94kW for 33% amp ratio.

I had to move the FP-cavity length to compensate the temperature change in the bunker.
doing that, I had the message "Low Limit SW pressed" when I tried to move P4z under -98 000 steps !!!
=> so, maybe this number is not the correct steps number and we are much closer to the end than we could expect.
=> could it be the reason for the 20Hz noise related to the too strong springs, as we already observed before ?

in the meantime, I changed the use of the P1z and P4z motors to not face the situation again.
so, P4z will be used to move to higher steps (even if its apparent position seems higher than P1z).
and P1z will be used to move to lower steps.

surprinsingly, the CEP position was almost already optimized...
 

after the new temperature setting for the bunker air cooling (winter to summer transition), the temperature drop from 24° to 20°C which induced a slight misalignment between the onefive oscillator and the fiber injection.
the amplifier photodiode PD_IN which checks the amplifier power injection drop also from 3mW to 2.885mW... hopefully, it is enough to start the amplifier without realignment.

but bad news, I don't see any transmission of the cavity... to be checked...

The temperature slitly increase in thomx Bunker from 23° to 24° during the last day.

The thermalisation of the CFP is very long...

In any case the operation of the CFP is so easy, it seems to be correlated to the weather... tody it's very nice as of hte rest of the week.

The stored power is easily 94 KW and there is not jump or delock problems.

The temperature of the bunker continiusly increase and now we observe some delocking du to high frq perturbations... may be the twe things are correlated.

today, after 1 week of vacation, I was able to easily lock the cavity with 92kW with 33% amp ratio without too much optimizations (no walking alignment).

could it be related to the nice weather we got during this week ?
as in the past we observed more noise when the weather was changing and we had very difficult locking procedure after a simple weekend...

today, we were able to store more than 97kW in the FP cavity, always with the same parameter : 33% laser amplifier ratio

today, the alignment of FP cavity was so bad that I tuned the 01 mode by error (CEP and alignment)...  insead of the 00 mode !!!
I was able to reach ~30kW and was limited at this value, so I used the camera to check what was happening and saw the 01 mode.

so, I moved the lock on a 00 mode and redid a full tuning (CEP and alignment).
I got ~93kW => ok

today, we were able to store more than 95kW in the FP cavity, always with the same parameter : 33% laser amplifier ratio

this morning, the cavity was pretty misaligned => basic alignment in y direction helps a lot => 93kW for 33% amp ratio.

the Rigol 33MHz generator phase was adjusted : phase ch2 = phase ch1 (40 deg) + 36 deg = 76 deg.

the phase between the 500Mhz ring RF oscillator and the electrons is measured on a BPM and is very stable after 2-3ms (<< 6ps, typically) !

in the same time, we can use the residual phase beating after our 500MHz mixer to estimate the phase noise coming from the laser part.
the rms noise of this signal is around 60mV for 1.25V peak (2.5 pk-pk) signal => ~ 50mrad rms

dt = dphi / 2pi * 2ns ~ 15 ps which is the noise measured between electrons and photons at the IP !!!

we clearly see that this rms noise level is correlated with the 20Hz oscillation observed on the FPC feedback signals.

BUT even when this rms phase noise varies, we DO NOT see any effect on the X-ray production at this time,
which means this is not yet a limiting factor.
this observation is confirmed by the X-ray production flux calculation for which the time jitter is "added" to the electron beam size parameter which seems to be dominant.

we installed a measurement at the IP with the BPM for ion cleaning for electrons and we used a fast photodiode at the output of the FP-cavity and measured with a fast oscilloscope the phase jitter between the 2 signals.
in red, the BPM signal
in blue, the photodiode signal.

on the right of the picture, this is the trend of the phase difference measurement.
in yellow, this is the histogram of this phase difference.

one measured 35ps of FWHM which is equivalent to 15ps rms for a Gaussian distribution.

from now on, one reverts the FP cavity motors direction to compensate the long drift from the begining of the project.
the motor MOT.06 will be used for the upward direction (presently -1 082 650 steps)
and the motor MOT.03 will be used for the downward direction (presently +37 170 steps)

after CEP and walking alignment tuning, I got quickly 92kW.

the new MOT.06 and MOT.03 positions are : -1 071670 steps and +34 110 steps.
the CEP motor is at +345µm

this afternoon, we succeeded to get a quite long Xray production trend around 15-20 minutes with a flux above 25k on i1.

today, we had a strange effect :
both the laser and the FP cavity were locked on the RF frequency (500.10045 MHz), and we were producing X-rays but with a slowing (several seconds) fluctuation exactly as the electrons-photons phase was drifting and the fluctuation can goes to 0 Xrays produced even at the "right" phase.
but the ring people says there is no phase fluctuation in their measurements.
and I looked the baseline of the 500MHz beating (which is the synchronisation signal with electrons) and I didn't see any fluctuation either.

we tried 2 other ring frequencies : 500.10030 MHz and 500.1 MHz.
there were still X-rays production fluctuations but with a faster rate.
when we went back to 500.10045 MHz, we found back the same X-rays production fluctions at a slow rate.

to remove this effect, I had to add an integrator gain (I = 1e-6) in the Laselock in the FPC/RF loop.
this integrator was not used (I = 0) in the previous stable X-rays productions....

it means that we have now a slow phase fluctuation.
we have to check if we see these fluctuations in the 500MHz beating signal.
loosing the Xrays means we moved by the packet length dt ~ 50ps which is equivalent to 9° @ 500MHz of fluctuation.
with A= +/-1V signal, it would be equivalent to a drift of ~ A*(2pi*dt/T) ~ 157mV !!!
it is strange we didn't see it => to be checked !!!

conclusion : now, we have to put this I=1e-6 in the FPC/RF loop to get a stable Xray production.
but the locking acquisition works better with I=0.
so we need to remove it before starting to lock and then, when the lock is stable (but the X rays are poor), we need to put I=1e-6 => the Xray flux inscreases dramatically.

for this 20Hz oscillation, could it be a natural resonance of the optical table placed on its feet ?

typical mass of the table m ~ 8T

feets :
young modulus of steel E ~ 210 G N/m²
length L ~ 1m
diameter d ~ 10cm
rigidity for 6 feets => k ~ 6. pi.d²/4L E ~ 9.9 G N/m

rough estimation of the oscillation frequency : f = sqrt(k / m) / 2pi ~ 177 Hz

if the rigidity of the real moving feets is lower (~ by a factor 80) than if they were made of plain steel, we are not so far.
to be continued...

 

today, we were able to store more than 94kW in the FP cavity, always with the same parameter : 33% laser amplifier ratio

I installed the accelerometer on the ground close to one feet of the FP cavity hexapod (see picture) and restarted the acquisition at 6:40pm on 20th of february.

the acquisition corresponds to the night between the 20th and the 21th of february.

23.3k points from 6:40pm to 9am => 2.215s / point

the large peaks in between 2k and 3.5k points correspond to 7:55pm to 8:50pm => some working operation in the bunker (maybe finish the work of the kicker).

one does not observe a clear decrease of the vibrations during the night.
I added a vertical zoom of the acquisition => it seems there is a small decrease during the night but nothing clear.

the last plot shows exactly the same data but with a strong filtering (raw data in blue, filtered data in red).
we see a little bit better the reduction of the vibration during the night.

long term pk-pk measurement of the accelerometer (placed on the optical cavity table, on the marble part close to the laser oscillator) from 5:30pm to 9am => ~ 2.255s / pt

start of the quiet period : ~ 5k pts <=> 8:45pm
3 peaks at ~ 7.5k, 8.5k, 9.5k pts <=> 10:10pm, 10:50pm, 11:30pm
begining of the noise : big peak at ~20.5k pts <=> 6:20am

conclusion : relatively same behavior than the previous measurement made in the same condition except the "quiet" and "wake up" schedule of the noise is not strictly the same.

here is the same kind of measurement (pk-pk of 1 sec of acquisition) done on the laser PZT when the FP is at 90kW.
it's from 6:20pm to 7:10pm => ~2.4s by point

the minimum values are for the PZT being off.
the maximum values are for PZT scanning or lock loss.

in between, we get the measurements of the perturbations.

at 6:30pm (~250 points), Jean-Noel stopped all the water cooling circuit of ThomX.
at 6:46pm (~650 points), Jean-Noel restarted the main water cooling circuit.
at 7pm (~1000 points), Jean-Noel restarted all the water cooling circuit.
at 7:10pm (~1250 points) => we stopped the acquisition.

conclusion : no clear effect of the water cooling circuit on the locking stability.

here is the acquisition from 10:30am to 5:30pm

11k point in 7h => 1.57k points / h

the noise is almost the same during the daylight, a little bit increasing from 1:30pm.

I restarted an acquisition at 5:30pm to check if the noise reduction during the night is repeatable or not....

here is the pk-pk measurement of the accelerometer during the whole night.
the recording started at 5pm yesterday and has been stopped this morning at 10am.

one got 28k points in 17 hours => 1.65k points / h

the "last" peak in the evening at 8.5k points is equivalent to 10pm.
the "fisrt" peaks in the morning at 23k points is equivalent to 7am.

I discussed with Jean-Noël but we don't any clear correlation of this schedule with some equipment schedule in ThomX....

I restarted a new acquisition at 10.30am.