[Q, Chloe]

Chloe has been to the lab twice to start up her investigations in acoustic noise coupling to mirrors. The general idea for the setup is a HeNe laser bouncing off a mirror and onto a QPD, whose signal provides a measure of beam displacement noise. The mirror will be mounted and excited in various ways to make quantitative conclusions about the quality of different mounting schemes.

We have set up the laser+mirror+QPD on the SP table, and collected data via SR560s->SR785, with the main aim of evaluating the suitability of this setup. The data we collected is not calibrated to any meaningful units (yet). For now, we are just using QPD volts.

Chloe collected data of vertical displacement noise for the following schemes: Terminated SR785 input, Terminated SR560 inputs, Laser centered directly onto the QPD, Laser shining on mirror centered on QPD, laser/mirror/qpd with some small desktop speakers producing white noise from http://www.simplynoise.com. Data shown below.