We hypothesize that the systematic error in the loss measurement can come from the fact that the requirement on the alignment of the cavity mirrors is not stringent enough.

We repeat the loss measurement with 50 measurements. This time we change the thresholds for the error signals of the dither-align in the measureArmLoss.py file from 0.5 to 0.3.

We repeat the analysis done before:

We plot the reflected power of the two states on top of each other:

This  time it appears there was no drift. The histogram of the loss measurement:

The mean is 104ppm and the variation is 27%.

What I notice this time is that the PD readings in the aligned and misaligned states are anti-correlated. This is also true in the previous run (where there was drift) when looking in the short time scales. I plot several time series to demonstrate:

I wonder what can cause this behaviour.