Having investigated the mode-overlap as a function of RoC of the PRC and SRC folding mirrors, I've now been looking into possible stability issues, with the help of some code that EricQ wrote some time back for a similar investigation, but using Finesse to calculate the round trip Gouy phase and other relevant parameters for our current IFO configuration.
To do so, I've been using:
- Most up to date arm length measurements of 37.81m for the Y arm and 37.79m for the X arm
- RoCs of all the mirrors from the phase map summary page
- Loss numbers from our November investigations
As a first check, I used flat folding mirrors to see what the HOM coupling structure into the IFO is like (the idea being then to track the positions of HOM resonances in terms of CARM offset as I sweep the RoC of the folding mirror).
However, just working with the flat folding mirror configuration suggests that there are order 2 22MHz and order 4 44MHz HOM resonances that are really close to the carrier resonance (see attached plots). This seems to be originating from the fact that the Y-arm length is 37.81m (while the "ideal" length is 37.795m), and also the fact that the ETM RoCs are ~3m larger than the design specification of 57m. Interestingly, this problem isn't completely mitigated if we use the ideal arm lengths, although the order 2 resonances do move further away from the carrier resonance, but are still around a CARM offset of +/- 2nm. If we use the design RoC for the ETMs of 57m, then the HOM resonances move completely off the scale of these plots... |