I've spent most of the last week doing background reading; fourier transforms, shm, e&m, and other physics that I didn't cover at school.  I also read a few chapters in Saulson, especially the chapter on noise and shot noise.  To get a better grip on what I'm going to be doing I read through the polarization chapter in Hobbs' "Optics" text, mostly on wave plates since that's a large part of this readout.  Since then I've been working up to calculating the shot noise, starting with the electric field throughout the new interferometer readout.