I want to measure the transfer function of the arm cavities to extract the pole frequencies and get more insight into what is going on with the DC loss measurements.

The idea is to modulate the light using the PSL AOM. Measure the light transmitted from the arm cavities and use the light transferred from the IMC as a reference.

I tried to start measuring the X arm but the transmission PD is connected to the QPD whitening filter board with a 4 pin Lemo for which I couldn't find an adapter.

• I switch to the Y arm where the transmission PD - Thorlabs PDA520 (250KHz Bandwidth) - is BNC all the way.
• I lay an 82ft BNC cable from the Y Arm 1Y4 to 1Y1 where the BNC from the IMC Trans PD and an SR785 are found. 
• I lock the Arm cavities.
• I connect the AOM cable to the source, the TRY PD (Teed off from the QPD whitening filter) to CH1 and IMC_TRANS to CH2 and measure the transfer function using a swept sine with an offset of 300mV and amplitude of 100mV.
• I fit it to a low pass filter function - see attachment 1 - but it seems like the fit rails off at 10KHz. 

Could this be because of the PDA520 limited BWs? I tried playing with the PD gain/bandwidth switch but it seems like it was already set to high bandwidth/low gain.

In any case, the extracted pole frequency ~ 2.9kHz implies a finesse > 600 (assuming FSR = 3.9MHz) which is way above the maximal finesse (~ 450) for the arm cavities.

I disconnected the source from the AOM. But left the other two BNCs connected to the SR785. Also, TRY PD is still teed off. Long BNC cable is still on the ground.