I completely agree with Koji. We definitely should have locked the half PRC first. We were all set up for that. Why go through all this work to align MICH when we haven't confirmed with the half PRC that the flipping is helping us? The first rule of debugging is to only make one change at a time. We have measurements from the half PRC, so we could have made a direct comparison with those to see how things have changed. If we jump the gun we're going to end up wasting more time when we have to back-track.
Also, we never talked about moving PR2 to adjust optical path length, although I can understand why we would think that should be done. My calculations were all done assuming the free-space separation between PRM/PR2 and PR2/PR3 were unchanged. It's possible changing the position is better, but again, it's more work and it changes multiple things at one. I can redo my calculations for this new scenario, but we need to update our drawings with this new configuration. Please note precisely where PR2 has moved to.
We should have just flipped PR2 and that's it. Then we could have run the exact same measurements we had previously. Only then, once we understood this new simple cavity, should we have done further adjustments. |