Summary:

Yesterday at the meeting, we talked about how the analog de-whitening filters in the coil driver path may be more aggressive than necessary. I think Attachment #1 shows that this is indeed the case.

Details:

I had done some modeling and measurement of some of these noises while I was putting together the initial DRMI noise budget, but I had never put things together in one plot. In Attachment #1, I've plotted the following:

1. Quadrature sum of seismic noise (from GWINC calculations) for 3 suspended optics (I'm sticking to the case of 3 optics since I've been doing all the noise-budgeting for MICH - for DARM, it will be 4 suspended optics).
2. The unfiltered DAC noise estimate. The voltage noise was measured in this elog. To convert this to displacement noise for 3 suspended optics, I've used the value of 1.55e-9/f^2 m/ct as the actuator coefficient. This number should be accurate under the assumption that the series resistance on the coil driver board output is 400 ohms (we could increase this - by how much depends on how much actuation range is needed).  
3. Coil driver board and de-whitening board electronics noises (added in quadrature). I've used the LISO model noises, which line up well with the measured noises in elogs 13010 and 13015.
4. The DAC noise filtered by the de-whitening transfer function, separately for the cases of using one or both of the available biquad stages. This cannot be lower than the preceeding trace (electronics noise of de-whitening and coil driver boards), so should be disregarded where it dips below it. 

It would seem that the coil driver + de-whitening board electronic noises dominate above ~150Hz. The electronics noise is ~10nV/rtHz at the output of the coil driver board, which is only a factor of 100 below the DAC noise - so the stopband attenuation of ~70dB on the de-whitening boards seems excessive.

We can lower this noise by a factor of 2.5 if we up the series resistance on the coil driver boards from 400ohm to 1kohm, but even so, the displacement noise is ~1e-18 m/rtHz. I need to investigate the electronics noises a little more carefully - I only measured it for the case when both biquad stages were engaged, I will need to do the model for all permutations - to be updated. 

Attachment #2 has an iPython notebook used to generate this plot along with all the data.

Edit 28 Jul 2.30pm: I've added Attachment #3 with traces for different assumed values of the series resistance on the coil driver board - although I have not re-computed the Johnson noise contribution for the various resistances. If we can afford to reduce the actuation range by a factor of 25, then it looks like we get to within a factor of ~5 of the seismic noise at ~150Hz.