I was having trouble centering IPANG using the PZTs, and I suspected something funny was going on at the end. I went down there, and the beam was focused right on the PD, and the spot was very very small. I think this means that when I was trying to center the beam, I was falling into the gap between the pieces of the diode. Also, as Koji pointed out to me the other day, if the PD is at the focal point of the beam, any parallel rays hitting the lens just before the PD will all go to the same place, no matter how the input beam has moved. This means we're not getting as much info out as we'd like.
So. I moved the lens a little bit farther from the PD such that we are just beyond the focal point of the beam. The beam size is now ~1mm on the QPD.
This means, however, that I moved the beam on the QPD such that IPANG is no longer a reference of the input pointing. Ooops. I think this adjustment needed to be done though. Right now, the PZTs are set to where we had them yesterday, when we moved them slightly to center the IPANG QPD, and I've recentered IPANG. |