More progress on the AUX-laser cavity scans.

Changes to the Setup

• For scans, the Agilent is now being used as a standalone source of the LO signal provided to the AUX PLL (instead of the Marconi), which sets the RF offset. We discovered that when the sweep is "held" in network analyzer mode, it does not turn off the RF drive signal, but rather continues outputting a constant signal at the hold frequency. This eliminates the need to use the more complicated double-deomdulation previously in use. The procedure is to start and immediately hold the sweep, then lock the PLL, then restart the sweep. The PLL is able to reliably remain locked for frequency steps of up to ~30 kHz. The SURFs are preparing schematics of both the double- and single-demodulation techniques.
• Both the Marconi and Agilent are now phase-locked to the 10 MHz time reference provided by the rabidium clock. This did noticeably shift the measured resonance frequencies.
• I raised the PI controller gain setting to 4.5, which seems to better suppress the extra noise being injected.
• I've procured a set of surgical needles for occluding the beam to produce HOMs. However, I have not needed to use them so far, as the TEM00 purity of the AUX beam appears to already be low. The below scans show only the intrinisic mode content.

New Results

• YARM scan at 70 uW injection power (Attachment #1). The previously reported YARM scan was measured with 9 mW of injected AUX power, 100x larger than the power available from the SQZ laser at the sites. This scan repeats the measurement with the AUX power attenuated to uW. It still resolves the FSR and at least three HOMs.
• PRC scan (Attachment #2) at 9 mW injection power. It appears to resolve the FSR and at least three HOMs. Angular injection noise was found to cause large fluctuations in the measured signal power. This dominates the error bars shown below, but affects only the overall signal amplitude (not the peak frequency locations). The SQZ angular alignment loops should mitigate this issue at the sites.

Both data sets are attached.