I went out on the floor to look at the transmitted signal from the PMC to get a rough idea of the noise of the unstabilized laser. There was already a scope hooked up so I just used the measurement features to find the following:
Signal average = 875 mV. Peak-to-Peak noise = 45 mV
Assuming the noise can be approximated as Gaussian noise, the heuristic for converting to RMS noise of the signal is RMS = Peak-to-Peak / 8 (or Peak-to-Peak / 6, I've used both...)
-> RMS Noise ~ 6.5 mV
When designing my filtering stages and RMS detection/triggering, I'll use relative RMS, i.e. 6 mV / 875 mV = 0.007, as a measure of unstabilized laser noise. |