# Inertial control of the VIRGO Superattenuator1footnote 11footnote 1To appear in the Proceedings of the Third E.Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves Experiments, Caltech, Pasadena, 12-16 July 1999.

## I Introduction

The test mass suspension of the VIRGO detector, the superattenuator (SA) sa , has been designed in order to suppress the seismic noise below the thermal noise level above 4 Hz. The expected residual motion of the mirror is $`10^{18}`$ m$`\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}`$ @4 Hz. At lower frequencies, the residual motion of the mirror is much larger ($`0.1`$ mm RMS), due to the normal modes of the SA (the resonant frequencies of the system are in the range 0.04-2 Hz).

To lock the VIRGO interferometer the RMS motion of the suspended mirrors must not exceed $`10^{12}`$ m (to avoid the saturation of the read-out electronics). VIRGO locking strategy is based on a hierarchical control: feedback forces can be exerted on 3 points of the SA (inverted pendulum (IP) ip , marionetta and mirror). The control on the 3 points is operated in different ranges of frequency and amplitude. The maximum mirror displacement that can be controlled from the marionetta without injecting noise in the detection band is $`10`$ $`\mu `$m. Therefore, a damping of the SA normal modes is required for a correct operation of the locking system. An active control of the SA normal modes, using sensors and actuators on top of the IP, capable of reducing the mirror residual motion within a few microns, has been successfully implemented.

## II Experimental setup

The setup (fig. 1) of the experiment is composed by a full scale superattenuator, provided with 3 accelerometers (placed on the top of the IP), 3 LVDT position sensors (measuring the relative motion of the IP with respect to an external frame), 3 coil-magnet actuators. The accelerometers work in the range DC-400 Hz and have acceleration spectral sensitivity $`10^9\mathrm{m}\mathrm{s}^2\mathrm{Hz}^{1/2}`$ below 3 Hz acc . The sensors and actuators are all placed in pin-wheel configuration. The sensors and actuators signals are elaborated by a computer controlled ADC (16 bit)-DSP-DAC (20 bit) system. The DSP allows to handle the signals of all the sensors and actuators, to recombine them by means of matrices, to create complex feedback filters (like the one of fig. 5) with high precision poles/zeroes placement and to perform a large amount of calculations at high sampling rate (10 kHz). The suspended mirror is provided with an LVDT to measure its displacement with respect to ground.

## III The control strategy

The active control of the SA normal modes is defined inertial damping, because it makes use of inertial sensors (accelerometers) to sense the SA motion. The advantage of using accelerometers is that they perform the measurement with respect to the “fixed stars”, while position sensors do it with respect to a reference frame which is not seismic noise free. Therefore, inertial sensors are to be used so that no seismic noise is reinjected by the feedback. Actually, in the real SA control both sensors are used: position sensors provide a low frequency (DC - 10 mHz) control of the SA position (in order to avoid drifts), while accelerometers allow a wideband reduction of the noise in the region of the SA resonances (10 mHz - 2 Hz).

The object to control is a MIMO (multiple in-multiple out) system: each sensor (accelerometer/LVDT) is sensitive to the 3 modes (X,Y,$`\mathrm{\Theta }`$) of the IP and each actuator excites all the modes. To simplify the control strategy the sensors outputs and the actuators currents are digitally recombined to obtain independent SISO (single in-single out) systems (fig. 2): the system is described in the normal modes coordinates (for a description of the diagonalization procedure see nota ; tesi ). Each normal mode is associated to a so called virtual sensor (sensitive to that mode and “blind” to the others) and to a virtual actuator (acting on one mode only, leaving the others undisturbed). In this way one is able to implement independent feedback loops on each d.o.f., greatly simplifying the control strategy. Fig. 4 shows the output of the virtual accelerometers $`X`$ and $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$. In the $`X`$ plot, the 40 mHz resonance of the IP translation mode and all the modes of the SA chain are visible (as pole/zero structures). In the $`\mathrm{\Theta }`$ plot, only the rotation mode of the IP is visible. The two plots show that different feedback strategies have to be implemented on the different d.o.f..

The basic idea of inertial damping is to use the accelerometer signal to build up the feedback force. Actually, if the control band is to be extended down to DC, a position signal is necessary. Our solution was a merging of the two sensors: the virtual LVDT and accelerometer signals are combined in such a way that the LVDT signal ($`l(s)`$) dominates below a chosen cross frequency $`f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$ while the accelerometer signal ($`a(s)`$) dominates above it (see fig. 4 and ref. jila ). The feedback force has the form<sup>2</sup><sup>2</sup>2Actually, the LVDT signal $`l(s)`$ is properly filtered in order to preserve the feedback stability at the cross frequency and in order to reduce the amount of reinjected noise at $`f>f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$.:

$$f_{\mathrm{fb}}=G(s)\left[a(s)+ϵl(s)\right]$$
(1)   
where $`G(s)`$ is the digital filter transfer function (see fig. 5) and $`ϵ`$ is the parameter whose value determines $`f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$. We have chosen $`f_{\mathrm{merge}}10`$ mHz (corresponding to $`ϵ510^3`$). This approach allows to stabilize the system with respect to low frequency drifts at the cost of reinjecting a fraction $`ϵ`$ of the seismic noise via the feedback.

## IV Inertial control performance

The result of the inertial control (on 3 d.o.f.) is shown in figure 6. The measurement has been performed in air. The noise on the top of the IP is reduced over a wide band (10 mHz \- 4 Hz). A gain $`>1000`$ is obtained at the main SA resonance (0.3 Hz). The RMS motion of the IP (calculated as $`x_{\mathrm{RMS}}(f)=\sqrt{_f^{\mathrm{}}\stackrel{~}{x}^2(\nu )d\nu }`$) in 10 sec. is reduced from 30 to 0.3 $`\mu `$m. The closed loop floor noise corresponds to the fraction of seismic noise reinjected by using the position sensors for the DC control and can, in principle, be reduced by a steeper low pass filtering of the LVDT signal at $`f>f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$ and by lowering $`f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$: both this solution have drawbacks and need a careful implementation.

Preliminary measurements of the displacement of the mirror with respect to ground have been performed in air, using an LVDT position sensor. The residual RMS mirror motion in 10 sec. is<sup>3</sup><sup>3</sup>3This number has been obtained with a feedback design less aggressive then the one of fig. 5: the gain raised as $`1/f`$, the cross frequency was 30 mHz and no compensation of the dips was needed.:

$$x_{\mathrm{RMS}}(0.1\mathrm{Hz})3\mu \mathrm{m}.$$
(2)   
When the damping is on such a measurement can provide only an upper bound because the LVDT output is dominated by the seismic motion of the ground.

## V Further developments

Several ways of improving the inertial damping performance have been identified:

* a steeper low pass filtering of the LVDT output above $`f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$ may reduce the amount of reinjected seismic noise. In doing this one has to be careful to preserve proper phase difference between the LVDT and accelerometer signals;
* the lower $`f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$ the smaller the amount of reinjected noise. Lowering $`f_{\mathrm{merge}}`$ is difficult due to the mechanical tolerance on the parallelism of the IP legs: if the legs are not perfectly parallel, the top table tilts slightly as it translates. Therefore, the accelerometer signal is dominated by the tilt below 15-20 mHz, making thus impossible to use the accelerometers at very low frequencies. A technique for subtracting the effect of the tilt (using the information provided by the displacement sensors) has been defined and used to obtain the results here described damp . Cancelling the tilt effect down to $`5`$ mHz makes us able to use the accelerometers down to 10 mHz damp . Stricter requirements on the IP legs machining and improvements in the tilt subtraction technique may allow a lower cross frequency.