Keiko, Suresh

AM modulations are still there ... the mechanical design for the stages, RF cables, and connections are not good and affecting the alignment.

I write the activity in the time series this time - Because we suspect the slight EOM misalignment to the beam produces the unwanted AM sidebands, we tried to align the EOM as much as possible. First I aligned the EOM tilt aligner so that the maximum power goes through. I found that about 5% power was dumped by EOM. After adjusting the alignment, the AM modulation seemed be much better and stable, however, it came up after about 20 mins. They grew up up to about -40dBm, while the noise floor is -60 dBm (when AM is minimised, with DC power of 8V by PDA225 photodetector).

We changed the EOM stage (below the tilt aligner) from a small plate to a large plate, so that the EOM base can be more stable. The EOM stands on the pile of several black plate. There was a gap below the tilt aligner because of a small plate.  So we swapped the small plate to large plate to eliminate the springly gap. However it didn't make any difference - it is the current status and there is still AM modulations right now.

During above activities, we leaned that the main cause of the EOM misalignment may be the RF cables and the resonator box connected to the EOM. They are connected to the EOM by an SMA adaptor, not any soft cables. It is very likely applying some  torc force to the EOM box. The resonator box is almost hunging from the EOM case and just your slight touch changes EOM alinment quite a bit and AM mod becomes large. 

I will replace the SMA connector between the resonator box and EOM to be a soft cable, so that the box doesn't hung from EOM tomorrow. Also, I will measure the AM mod depth so that we compare with the PM mod depth.