Jessica will soon ELOG about some measurements suggesting that the conductive connector-ized ALS delay line enclosure is the way to go, when considering crosstalk between the delay lines. It is currently mounted and hooked up on the LSC rack, though I need to make a bunch of new SMA cables now that I think a semi-permanent arrangement has been reached.
I did a rough re-calibration of the phase tracker output, since the increased cable delay changes the degree/Hz gain. This was done by fitting a line to a slow sawtooth FM of the SRS DS345's (1Hz rate, 10kHz deviation, 30MHz carrier). This resulted in the following calibration updates
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ALSX: 19230 -> 13051 Hz/count, 3.4dB more sensitive
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ALSY: 19425 -> 12585 Hz/count, 3.8db more sensitive
Again, this is a rough calibration. Nevertheless, it is not so surprising we don't get the 50m/30m = 4.4dB increase we would expect just from the lengths; the (I presume) increased cable loss matters. Also, the loss' frequency dependance is an additional reason that the phase tracker calibration is not constant over all frequencies.
I took spectra with the arms in IR lock, but didn't see any real improvement beyond a possible dip in the floor from 100-200Hz. This doesn't surprise me too much, however, since I don't believe that we are currently dominated by electronic noises that this gain increase would help overcome.
Last week, Koji mentioned the ALS phase noise added due to the post-cavity table motion the arm-transmitted green beams experience before hitting the beat PD. I should estimate the size of this effect for our situation. |