This past week I have worked on the following:

1. Setting up the infrastructure to do noise analysis: We added a temporary channel on the DAQ to connect to the PD 55 which we are using to take the power measurement. Before that, I connected the PD55 to an oscilloscope and recorded the power.

The power at PD55 as measured using the oscilloscope = 600 µV.

Then I tried to calibrate the channel by sending up a signal from the function generator and measuring up the offset.. However, the channels seems noisy enough, especially due to electronics noise as suggested by the measurements and FFT calculation.

2. I worked on trying to sync the data acquisition of the PD and the CAM. After sometime spent on fiddling with the software method such as taking images at stamped time and then lining them up with the daq timestamps, I found a hardware method as suggested by Aidan. It was putting up a shutter (Uniblitz shutter and driver VMMD1) in the setup. I synced the shutter with the camera for which I had to tear apart the previously made trigger box and add a sync output from the camera (took a while as I also had to make a new cable).

3. I worked (still working) on making a differential amplifier to blow up the signal from the PD.