In connection with our work on the ISS I attempted to measure the PMC cavity pole.
I swept the PMC PZT and looked at the transmission through the cavity on the ISS Monitor diode (which is now back on the table, feel free to remove it again tomorrow).
To avoid thermal effects I reduced the laser power using the half wave plate at the laser ouput (rotated from 6 deg to 340deg).
I swept the PZT using the triangle wave command "trianglewave C1: PSL-PMC_RAMP -3.5 3.3 20 200". I noticed that the functional form of the resonances deteriorated over the duration of the excitation. Each sweep was able to capture just over one FSR. The resonances were a little close to the 'points' of the triangle wave for my liking although I don't think PZT hysteresis was a big factor.
Looking at the data the peaks are not of uniform width across a sweep or between consecutive sweeps. Hence any results from this mesurement are not particularly useful. I can't be sure if this was due to misalignments, thermal effects, higher order mode content or some other affect.
Rob suggests sweeping the laser frequency using the NPRO PZT instead. |