After Alberto and I worked on aligning the reference cavity, Rob asked the important and useful question: what is the visibility of the reference cavity. This helps tell us if we're optimally aligned or not even close.
I did a scan of the ref cav temperature, using /scripts/PSL/FSS/SLOWscan, but there seems to be no real signal is C1:PSL-FSS_RFPDDC. As shown in Alberto's 200-day plot, it does change sometimes, but if you zoom in on the flat parts, it seems like it's not really reading anything meaningful. I did a cursory check-out of it, but I'm not 100% sure where to go from here: There are (as with all of these gold-box PDs) 3 outputs: a ribbon cable (for ADC purposes I think), an SMA for the RF signal, and a BNC for the DC signal. The photodiode is clearly working, since if you stick the Lollypop in front of the PD, the cavity unlocks. I plugged a 'scope into the DC BNC, and it also behaves as expected: block the beam and the signal goes down; unblock the beam and the signal goes up. Something of note is that this readout gives a positive voltage, which decreases when the beam is blocked. However, looking at the dataviewer channel, nothing at all seems to happen when the beam is blocked/unblocked. So the problem lies somewhere in the get-signal-to-DAQ path. I unplugged and replugged in the ribbon cable, and the value at which the channel has been stuck changed. Many days ago, the value was -0.5, for the last few days it's been -1.5, and after my unplug/replug, it's now back to ~ -0.5 . The other day Alberto mentioned, and made the point again today that it's a little weird that the PD reads out a negative voltage. Hmm.
Do we have a tester-cable, so that instead of the ribbon cable, I can plug that connector (or pins thereof) into a 'scope? |