I tested the OMC-L HV driver box again, and made the following observations:

• Drove the HV diff pins (2,7) with a 5V triangle wave
  • Observed that with a ~0.4V offset on the drive, the HV output (measured directly with a 10x probe) has a 0-(almost)200V triangle wave (for 200V HV in), saturating near 200V and near 0V somewhat before reaching the full range of the triangle
  • The HV mon gives the same answer as measuring the HV output directly, and is reduced 100x compared to the HV output.
  • At 1Hz and above, the rolloff of the low pass still attenuates the drive a bit, and we don't reach the full range.
• Drove the HV dither pins (1,6) with a 100mV to 10V triangle wave, around 15kHz
  • Even at 10V, the dithering is near the noise of the mon channel, so while I could see a slight peak changing on the FFT near the dither frequency, I couldn't directly observe this on a scope using the mon channel
  • However, measuring the HV directly I do see the dither applied on top of the HV signal. The amplitude of the dither is the same on the HV output as on the dither drive.

[gautam, aaron]

We searched for blips while nominally scanning the OMC length.

We sent a 0.1Hz, 10Vpp triangle wave to the OMC piezo drive diff channels, so the piezo length is seeing a slow triangle wave from 0-200V.

Then, we applied a ~15kHz dither to the OMC length. This dither is added directly onto the HV signal, so the amplitude of the dither at the OMC is the same as the amplitude of the dither into the HV driver.

We monitored the OMC REFL signal (where we saw no blips yesterday) and mixed this with the 15kHz dither signal to get an error signal. Gautam found a pomona box with a low pass filter, so we also low passsed to get rid of some unidentified high frequency noise we were seeing (possibly a ground loop at the function generator? it was present with the box off, but gone with the AC line unplugged). [So we made our own lock-in amplifier.] Photo attached.

We tested the transfer function of the LP, and finding it at 100kHz rather than the advertised 10kHz, we opened the box, removed a resistor to change the 3dB back to 10kHz, and confirmed this by measuring the TF.

We didn't see flashes of error signal in the mixed reflection either, so we suspect that either the PZT is not actuating on the OMC or the alignment is bad. Based on what appears to be the shimmering of far-misaligned fringes on the AS camera, Aaron's suspicion from aligning the cavity with the card, and the lack of flashes, we suspect the alignment. To avoid being stymied by a malfunctioning PZT, we can scan the laser frequency next time rather than the PZT length.