For most of last week, the SURFs + Jenne were helping Mike and Ken with "stray light control for
Enhanced LIGO", i.e. cleaning and baking many many baffles which will catch scattered light in the
interferometer.
Otherwise, the two channels of the Mach Zehnder which will be used to measure fibre noise were
balanced, which should reduce the effect of laser amplitude noise in phase noise detection. I have
set up two digital channels to collect time series data from the two photodiodes and took some
preliminary noise measurements. I will be using Matlab to combine the signals as to directly measure
the phase noise, and I wrote some Matlab code to speed up this process: loading the files,
manipulating time series data, and converting into frequency domain. Currently I am building a
filter that will attenuate the signal at frequencies below 1Hz and amplify at higher frequencies in
order to whiten the spectra and reduce ADC noise. |