I've been using an SR560 to experiment with differnent pole frequencies, to try and cancel the mystery zero. It's after the ALS demod board, before the pomona LPF with a gain of five. 

A pole frequency of 3kHz seems to recover sensible loop shapes. I've been able to crossover the AO path to make a nice long phase bubble which isn't the prettiest, but seems workable.

Getting to this point is now almost entirely scripted and repeatable; one just has to make sure that the ALS beat has the correct sign and adjust the delay line length. Most frustratingly, due to the dependence of the ALS gain on beat frequency / magnitude / delay, which can all vary on the order of a few dB, the AO gain settings to get to the crossed over point are not always the same, so at the end it's a lot of small steps and frequent loop measurements. 

The FSS crossover and overall IMC loop gain have to be pretty actively managed too. It's all too easy to drive the pockel's cell crazy. And if it's going crazy on its own anyways, there's no hope in trying to pile ALS sensing noise on top of it... It would really help in this effort to fix the whole PC situation up. 

Unfortunately, lock is lost when increasing the overall gain on the common mode board even by 1dB. We've seen in the single arm tests, that the gain settings have an appreciable difference in offset between them. Maybe this step is more than what the loop can handle? Or maybe it's the voltage glitches... Maybe some gain reallocation can put me on a region of the slider that glitches less.

In terms of the mystery plant features, I figure I'd like to take the analog TF of AO control signal to, say, AS55, and see what may or may not be there. I just haven't done this tonight since it would involve recabling the analyzer, and I still need frequent loop measurements to get to the crossed over state. Having ITMY misaligned and using the digital AS55Q spectrum as an out of loop monitor has been very helpful.