Yamamoto, Tanaka

After today's maintenance work we noticed that the laser output was at zero. We checked how long it had been zero and found that the laser output had dropped to zero all at once at around 10:50 today. According to Yamamoto-san, this was before the maintenance work had been carried out.

Later, when we looked at the laser controller screen via the webcam in the PSL, we saw the error message "temperature too High, Master Fault" (Fig, 1) The temperature displayed on the controller was 52°C, which was much higher than the nominal value of 23°C.

When we entered the mine, we first checked whether the chiller was working properly, and the chiller temperature display showed a nominal value of 19 degrees Celsius, which seemed to be working properly.

We then entered the PSL and touched the enclosure of the fibre amplifier and did not feel any heat in the enclosure. I also held up a sensor card around the laser's output port and found that a very weak light was emitted. The "seed" value on the controller was about 1.4. According to Nakano-san's manual, this "seed" value indicates the incident power to the fibre amplifier and should be between 1.0 and 2.5 as a nominal value. In other words, the incident power is considered to be normal. The current value of the NPRO controller was about 0.96 A, which is the nominal value, so the NPRO controller is probably normal.

According to Nakano-san's manual, in this case it was most likely a thermometer malfunction, which was fixed by switching off the laser, unplugging the connection cable from the amplifier to the PC and restarting the application, so we thought we would try this approach. However, at the beginning of the manual, there is a warning that if the amplifier is switched on while the seed laser is off, it may break down, while the operating procedure states that the power should be switched on from the amplifier. This contradicted the warning, and as we could not decide which was correct, we decided not to power down the whole laser today (although we are sure the warning is correct).

Instead, we first switched off the fibre amplifier only and restarted it. However, the situation remained the same. We then switched off the fibre amplifier, closed the app, and then restarted the amplifier and the app. However, the situation remained the same.

At this point, we noticed that before pressing the "ENABLE" button on the controller app, i.e. when the laser was not emitting, the thermometer on the controller was showing around 3.5°C, and when we pressed the "ENABLE " button was pressed, the value of the thermometer rose up to 52 degrees Celsius drastically. When the "STOP" button was pressed, the thermometer value suddenly dropped from 52°C to about 3.5°C. This seems to be an odd behaviour of the thermometer.

At any rate, as it was late, we finished today's investigation.

Tomorrow, we will try to restart the whole laser system including seed laser.