The dump and some temporary mirrors were removed and now the REFL beam is available again.

I locked PRMI with REFL signals, it locked as usual.

[Suresh / Kiwamu]

Currently the REFL beam is bypassed by additional mirrors and blocked by a razor blade dump.

Therefore the signals associated with the REFL ports (e.g. REFL11, REFLDC and etc.) are unavailable.

Just be aware of it.

I moved some of the REFL optics on the AS table by a teeny bit to accomodate the new place that the REFL beam exits the chamber (none of this was done while we were at air....we were only dealing with the AS beam at the time, and were happy that REFL came out of the vacuum).

The REFL beam is now on the REFL camera (with PRMI aligned), and the beam is going toward the 4 REFL RF PDs, but it's not aligned to any of them.

I have some questions as to mystery optics on in the REFL path.  There is a 90% BS, and I don't know where the 10% reflection goes....is it going to beat against the AUX Stochino laser?

I have to go, and I didn't fix the videocapture script today, so pix tomorrow, I promise.

According to the wiki, REFL 11 has a transimpedance of 4.08kV/A, and REFL 55 has a transimpedance of 615V/A.  This is a ratio of ~6.5 .  My optickle simulations from earlier this evening indicate that, at maximum, there is a ~factor of 2 more signal in REFL 11 than REFL 55.  This is a factor of order 10-15.  Then, REFL 55 has 15dB whitening gain, which is a factor of ~4.  So, this explains why we're seeing so much more digital signal on REFL11 than REFL55.

Tomorrow, I need to replace the 50/50 beam splitter that splits the beam between REFL55 and REFL11 (33 and 165 have already had their light picked off at this point).  I want to put in a 10% reflector, 90% transmission beamsplitter.  Steve, can you please find me one of these, and if we don't have one, order one? This will give us a little more light on 55, and less light on 11, so hopefully we won't be saturating things anymore.

As I always tell everyone: Don't use a 10% reflector which produce ghost beams. Use a 90% reflector.

 Hmmm, yes, I forgot (bad me).  I'll find a 90% refl BS, and swap the positions of REFL11 and REFL55.

I have done the swap in the REFL path.  First, I swapped the positions of REFL11 and REFL55.  Then, I swapped out the 50/50 BS for a 90% reflection BS.  (90% goes to REFL55, 10% goes to REFL11).  I also changed the aluminum dump that was dumping the old REFL165 path into a razor dump.

Before: REFL11 had 4.0mW, REFL55 had 3.1mW.  Now, REFL11 has 0.53mW, and REFL55 has 6.9mW.  REFL165 still has around 61mW of light, and REFL33 has 3.3mW (the things that were changed were after 165 and 33 in the REFL path). 

Now, the DC value of the REFL PDs are:  REFL165 = 10.4V, REFL33 = 110mV, REFL55 = 232mV, REFL11 = 18.6mV. 

As I was finishing aligning the beams onto all of the REFL diodes, Manasa asked for the IFO so she and Masayuki could continue their work on the Xarm, so I'll check the signals acquired a little later.

We need to calculate whether this level of astigmatism is expected from the new active TT mirrors, but I claim that the beam is not clipped.

As proof, I provide a video (PS, why did it take me so long to be converted to using video capture??).  I'm just showing the REFL camera, so the REFL beam as seen out on the AS table.  I am moving PRM only.  I can move lots in pitch before I start clipping anywhere.  I have less range in yaw, but I still have space to move around.  This is not how a clipped beam behaves.  The clipping that I see after moving a ways is coincident with clipping seen by the camera looking at the back of the Faraday.  i.e. the first clipping that happens is at the aperture of the Faraday, as the REFL beam enters the FI.  

Also, I'm no longer convinced entirely that the beam entering the Faraday is a nice circle.  I didn't check that very carefully earlier, so I'd like to re-look at the return beam coming from TT1, when the PRM is misaligned such that the return beam is not overlapped with the input beam.  If the beam was circular going into the Faraday, I should have as much range in yaw as I do in pitch.  You can see in the movie that this isn't true.  I'm voting with the "astigmatism caused by non-flat active TT mirrors" camp. 

Let's wait for astigmatism calculation.
In either case(clipping or astigmatism), it takes time to fix it. And we don't need to fix it because we can still get LSC signal from REFL.
So why don't we start aligning input TTs and PRMI tomorrow morning.

Take the same alignment procedure we did yesterday, but we should better check REFL more carefully during the alingment. Also, use X arm (ETMX camera) to align BS. We also have to fix AS steering mirrors in vacuum. I don't think it is a good idea to touch PR2 this time, because we don't want to destroy sensitive PR2 posture.


Calculations need to be done in in-air PRMI work:
  1. Explanation for REFL astigmatism by input TTs (Do we have TT RoCs?).
  2. Expected g-factor of PRC (DONE - elog #8068)
  3. What's the g-factor requirement(upper limit)?
    Can we make intra-cavity power fluctuation requirement and then use PRM/2/3 angular motion to break down it into g-factor requirement?
    But I think if we can lock PRMI for 2 hours, it's ok, maybe.
  4. How to measure the g-factor?
    To use tilt-and-measure-power-reduction method, we need to know RoC of the mirror you tilted. If we can prove that measured g-factor is smaller than the requirement, it's nice. We can calculate required error for the g-factor measurement.

To see how much of the light that comes out of the REFL port actually goes to the PDs, I measured the power immediately after leaving the vacuum (~575mW) and in front of REFL11 (~5mW) and REFL55 (~6mW).

So, 0.01 of the power leaving the vacuum actually goes to the REFL PDs. This number will be useful when calculating the actual signals (in volts) that we expect to see.

I have recalibrated the REFL signals.

I first adjusted the demod phases until the I-signals lined up with the I-phase in the sensing matrix plot:

I then balanced the ITM drives by pushing on -1*ITMX and +1.015*ITMY, and seeing a minimum of MICH actuation in the I-phase of REFL55 (the PD I was locking with).

I then took a nice long measurement with DTT, and measured the peak heights in I and Q for each REFL diode.  I was driving PRM with 100 cts at 675.1Hz, and ITMX with 1000 cts at 452.1 Hz (and matching ITMY drive, to make pure MICH).  Knowing these numbers, and the actuator calibrations (PRM elog 8255, ITMs elog 8242), I know that I was driving PRCL by ~4.3 pm, and MICH by ~23 pm. 

For the I-phase calibrations, I find the peak height at the PRCL drive frequency, and divide 4.3 pm by that height.  For the Q-phase calibrations, I find the peak height at the MICH drive frequency, and divide 23 pm by that height.

This gives me the following calibrations:

 My calibrated REFL spectra then looks like:

[Jenne, Unni, Manasa]

I touched some in-vac steering mirrors, so we have REFL and IPANG coming out of the vacuum, not clipping.  IPPOS was done yesterday.  I re-checked a few optics in the AS path that were hard to see yesterday while the plastic light access connector was in place, and AS still looks good.

Except for POX, POY, POP, and putting the regular EQ stops back on PRM, I think we're done with the in-vac stuff.

 [Rana, Jenne, Manasa]

POX is coming out of the vacuum.  We'll do POY tomorrow.  We were able to hold the Watec outside the chamber and focus it on the pickoff mirror, and make sure it was roughly centered.  Then we took the lens off the camera, put the camera in the POX beam path, and I steered the pickoff mirror until we were hitting the camera.  POY will be done the same way.

POP is more challenging, since the transmission of the G&H mirrors is so low.  We're not able to see a beam on an IR card held in the POP beam path.  I had thought of removing PR2, getting the beam out, then putting PR2 back (using the same dog clamping some alignment markers technique that we use for the test masses), but the G&H mirrors have a 2 degree wedge, so this won't work.  It would be fine for pitch, since the arrow is on the side of the optic, but it wouldn't be correct for yaw.

Maybe we should do something similar to what Suresh et. al. did when they set POP up originally - I think they put a green laser pointer on the POX table, and aligned it such that they were hitting the correct spot on PR2 and PRM (correct = the same as the IR spot, which should be the center of the optics).  If we can do that with the POP in-vac steering mirrors, then we're fine, and POP should come out when we're back to high power.

All video capture snapshots of tonights pictures are on the pianosa desktop.

After adding an inductor L=100uH and a resistor R=10Ohm in parallel after the OP547A opamp that provide the bias for the photodiode of REFL11, the noise at low frequency that I had observed, was significantly reduced.

See this plot:

A closer inspection of the should at 11MHz in the noise spectrum, showed some harmonics on it, spaced with about 200KHz. Closing the RF cage and the box lid made them disappear. See next plot:

The full noise spectrum looks like this:

A big bump is present at ~275MHz. it could important if it also shows up on the shot noise spectrum.

#
#                 gnd
#                 |
#                 Cw2
#                 |
#                 n23
#                 |
#                 Lw2
#                 |
#   gnd           n22
#   |             |
#   Rip           Rw2
#   |             |                   |\
#   nt- Rsi-n2- - - C2 - n3 -  - -  - |  \
#            |    |      |   |        |4106>-- n5 - Rs -- no                                                            
# iinput    Rd   L1     L2 R24    n6- |  /     |           |
#    |- nin- |    |      |   |    |   |/       |         Rload
#           Cd   n7     R22 gnd   |            |           |
#            |    |      |        | - - - R8 - -          gnd
#           gnd  R1     gnd      R7
#                 |               |
#                gnd             gnd
#
#
#

What??? I don't see any gray trace of Rs in the plot. What are you talking about?

Anyway, if you are true, the circuit is bad as the noise should only be dominated by the thermal noise of the resonant circuit.

From the measurements of the 11 MHz RFPD at 11Mhz I estimated a transimpedance of about 750 Ohms. (See attached plot.)

The fit shown in the plot is: Vn = Vdn + sqrt(2*e*Idc) ; Vn=noise; Vdn=darknoise; e=electron charge; Idc=dc photocurrent

The estimate from the fit is 3-4 times off from my analsys of the circuit and from any LISO simulation. Likely at RF the contributions of the parassitic components of each element make a big difference. I'm going to improve the LISO model to account for that.

The problem of the factor of 2 in the data turned out to be not a real one. Assuming that the dark noise at resonance is just Johnson's noise from the resonant circuit transimpedance underestimates the dark noise by 100%.

Putting my hands ahead, I know I could have taken more measurements around the 3dB point, but the 40m needs the PDs soon.

Something must be wrong. 

1. Physical Unit is wrong for the second term of "Vn = Vdn + Sqrt(2 e Idc)"

2. Why does the fit go below the dark noise?

3. "Dark noise 4 +/- NaN nV/rtHz"   I can not accept this fitting.

Also apparently the data points are not enough.

 1) True. My bad. In my elog entry (but not in my fit code) I forgot the impedance Z= 750Ohm (as in the fit) of the resonant circuit in front of the square root: Vn = Vdn + Z * sqrt( 2 e Idc )

2) That is exactly the point I was raising! The measured dark noise at resonance is 2x what I expect.

I also admitted that the data points were few, especially around the 3dB point.

Today I'm going to repeat the measurement with a new setup that lets me tune the light intensity more finely.

 Here's another measurement of the noise of the REFL11 PD.

This time I made the fit constraining the Dark Noise. I realized that it didn't make much sense leaving it as a free coefficient: the dark noise is what it is.

Result: the transimpedance of REFL11at 11 MHz is about 4000 Ohm.

Data looks perfect ... but the fitting was wrong.

Vn = Vdn + Z * sqrt( 2 e Idc ) ==> WRONG!!!

Dark noise and shot noise are not correlated. You need to take a quadratic sum!!!

Vn^2 = Vdn^2 + Z^2 *(2 e Idc)

And I was confused whether you need 2 in the sqrt, or not. Can you explain it?
Note that you are looking at the raw RF output of the PD and not using the demodulated output... 

Also you should be able to fit Vdn. You should put your dark noise measurement at 10nA or 100nA and then make the fitting.

[Koji and Kevin]

I was trying to characterize the REFL11 photodiode by shining a flashlight on the photodiode and measuring the DC voltage with an oscilloscope and the RF voltage with a spectrum analyzer. At first, I had the photodiode voltage supplied incorrectly with 15V between the +15 and -15 terminals. After correcting this error, and checking that the power was supplied correctly to the board, no voltage could be seen when light was incident on the photodiode.

We looked at the REFL55 photodiode and could see ~200 mV of DC voltage when shining a light on it but could not see any signal at 55 MHz. If the value of 50 ohm DC transimpedance is correct, this should be enough to see an RF signal. Tomorrow, we will look into fixing the REFL11 photodiode.

I just wanted to remind you that the most up to date resource about the RF system upgrade, including photodiodes, is the SVN.

https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/svn/trunk/alberto/40mUpgrade/RFsystem/

https://nodus.ligo.caltech.edu:30889/svn/trunk/alberto/40mUpgrade/RFsystem/RFPDs/REFL11/REFL11Schematics/40mUpgradeREFL11schematic.pdf

Because I was doing new things all the time, the wiki is not up to date. But the SVN has all I've got.

A new photodiode ( Perkin and Elmer Model no. C30642GH Sl No.1526) has been installed in the place of the old photodiode.  The datasheet of this model is attached. 

The 68pF capacitor which was present in parallel with the photodiode has been removed.  Here is a picture of the PCB ( in all its gory detail!) and the photodiode after replacement.

I also checked to see if we have a DC output from the new PD.  With 375mW of 1064nm light incident we have 15mV of output.  Which matches well with the typical Reponsivity of 0.8V/A reported in the datasheet and our REFL11 ckt .  The schematic of the ckt is also attached here for easy reference.  The various factors are

V_dc = 0.375 mW x 0.8 V/A x 10 Ohm x 5 = 15mV

The last factor is the gain of the last stage on the DC route.

When I reassembled the box I noticed that there is problem with the SMA connectors popping out of the box.  The holes seem misplaced so I enlarged the holes to remove this concern.

375 mW is way too much light. We must never put more than 100 mW on any of these diodes. We don't want to blow up more diodes like we did with the WFS. The InGaAs diodes often show an excess dark noise before they finally let go and completely fail. This one may show excess during the shot noise testing.

We should ensure that the beam paths are engineered so that none of these new detectors ever sees such high light levels.

The DC path should be made to let us see a 10V from the differential EPICS readout when there is 100 mA of photocurrent (i.e. an effective 100 Ohms transimpedance):

0.1 A  * 10 V/A * 5 V/V * 2V/V

The last factor of 2 is from the single to differential conversion.

If we really only get 15 mV from 375 mW, then this diode or the circuit is broken.

Suresh is saying 375mW and 0.375mW. Let's wait for his update of the actual power.

Also he is not using EPICS, there may be the factor of two missing for now.

It is 0.375 mW as in the calculation.  The total diode output is just 1mW and it is divided with a 50/50 beam splitter...  There are a couple of lenses along the way which may account for the ~12% loss. 

I used a handheld multimeter to measure the output.  

These are the dark noise spectrum that I measured on the 11MHz and 55MHz PD prototypes I modified.

The plots take into account the 50Ohm input impedance of the spectrum analyzer (that is, the nosie is divided by 2).

With an estimated transimpedance of about 300Ohm, I would expect to have 2-3nV/rtHz at all frequencies except for the resonant frequencies of each PD. At those resonances I would expect to have ~15nV/rtHz (cfr elog entry 2760).

Problems:

1. For the 55MHz PD the resonance peak is too small
2. In the 55 MHz: noise is present at about 7MHz
3. In the 11MHz PD there's a lot of noise below 10 MHz.

I have to figure out what are the sources of such noises.

Suggestions?

 Yesterday night I plugged back the REFL11 RF cable into the corresponding demodulation board.

I'm going to remove REFL11 demod for the noise check/circuit improvement.

----

• The module was removed (~4pm). Upon removal, I had to loosen AS110 LO/I out/Q out. Check the connection and tighten their SMAs upon restoration of REFL11.
• REFL11 configuration / LO: see below, PD: a short thick SMA cable, I OUT: Whitening CH3, Q OUT: Whitening CH4, I MON daughterboard: CM board IN1 (BNC cable)
• The LO cable for REFL11 was made of soft coax cable (Belden 9239 Low Noise Coax). The vendor specifies that this cable is for audio signals and NOT recommended for RF purposes [Link to Technical Datasheet (PDF)].
  I'm going to measure the delay of the cable and make a replacement.
• There is a bunch of PD RF Mon cables connected to many of the demo modules. I suppose that they are connected to the PD calibration system which hasn't been used for 8 years. And the controllers are going to be removed from the rack soon.
  I'm going to remove these cables.

----

First I checked the noise levels and the transfer functions of the daughterboard preamp were checked. The CH-1 of the SR785 seemed funky (I can't comprehensively tell yet how it was), so the measurement maybe unreliable.

For the replacement of AD797, I tested OP27 and TLE2027. TLE2027 is similar to OP27, but slightly faster, less noisy, and better in various aspects.

The replacement of the AD797 and whatever-film resistors with LTE2027 and thin-film Rs were straightforward for the I phase channel, while the stabilization of the Q phase channel was a struggle (no matter I used OP27 or TLE2027). It seems that the 1st stage has some kind of instability and I suffered from 3Hz comb up to ~kHz. But the scope didn't show obvious 3Hz noise.

After a quite bit of struggle, I could tame this strange noise by adjusting the feedback capacitor of the 1st stage. The final transfer functions and the noise levels were measured. (To be analyzed later)

----

Now the REFL11 LO cable was replaced from the soft low noise audio coax (Belden 9239) to jacketed solder-soaked coax cable (Belden 1671J - RG405 compatible). The original cable indicated the delay of -34.3deg (@11MHz, 8.64ns) and the loss of 0.189dB.

I took 80-inch 1671J cable and measured the delay to be ~40deg. The length was adjusted using this number and the resulting cable indicated the delay of -34.0deg (@11MHz, 8.57ns) and the loss of 0.117dB.

The REFL11 demod module was restored and the cabling around REFL11 and AS110 were restored, tightened, and checked.

----

I've removed the PD mon cables from the NI RF switch. The open ports were plugged with 50Ohm temirnators.

----

I ask commissioners to make the final check of the REFL11 performance using CDS.

Attachment 1: Transfer Functions

The original circuit had a gain of ~20 and the phase delay of ~1deg at 10kHz, while the new CH-I and CH-Q have a phase delay of 3 deg and 2 deg, respectively.

Attachment 2: Output Noise Levels

The AD797 circuit had higher noise at low frequency and better noise levels at high frequency. Each TLE2027 circuit was tuned to eliminate the instability and shows a better noise level compared to the low-frequency spectrum of the AD797 version.

RXA: AD797 , all hail the op-amps ending with 27 !

- Found the inductor which shunts the positive input of MAX4107 was not touching the ground.
This left the positive input level undetermined at DC. This was why MAX had been saturated.
The PCB has a cut, so it was surprising once the circuit worked.

- Resoldered the inductor to the ground. This made the circuit responding to the intensity-modulated beam.

- But the resonances and the notches were totally off, and the 200MHz oscillation has resurrected.

- Attached 40Ohm+22pF network between the neg-input of MAX and the gnd. This solved the oscillation.

- Made the tuning and the characterizations. The PD is on Kiwamu's desk and ready to go.

More to come later

I took REFL11 out from the AS table for a health check because it wasn't working properly.

The symptoms were :

   - a big offset of ~ -3 V on the RF output. No RF signals.

   - The DC output seemed to be okay. It's been sensitive to light.

I did a quick check and confirmed that +/- 5V were correctly supplied to the op-amps.

It looks that the last stage (MAX4107) is saturated for some reasons. Need more inspections.

At the moment the REFL11 RFPD is on the bench of the Jenne laser.

The full characterization of REFL11 is found in the PDF.

Resonance at 11.062MHz
Q of 15.5, transimpedance 4.1kOhm
shotnoise intercept current = 0.12mA (i.e. current noise of 6pA/rtHz)

Notch at 22.181MHz
Q of 28.0, transimpedance 23 Ohm

Notch at 55.589MHz
Q of 38.3, transimpedance 56 Ohm

I spent some time trying to understand how touching the metal cage inside or bending the PCB board affected the photodiode response. It turned out that there was some weak soldering of one of the inductors.

 Hartmut suggested a possible explanation for the way the electronics transfer function starts picking up at ~50MHz. He said that the 10KOhm resistance in series with the Test Input connector of the box might have some parasitic capacitance that at high frequency lowers the input impedance.

Although Hartmut also admitted that considering the high frequency at which the effect is observed, anything can be happening with the electronics inside of the box.

This is with reference to Kevin and Jenne's elogs  # 3890, 4034 and 4048 . 

While the electronics are working okay, there is no DC signal from the photodiode. 

Since the solderings and tracks on the PCB were fine I took a close look at the exposed front face of the photodiode.

As we can see, one of the thin wires on the top surface of the photodiode is broken.  We can see some wipe marks closer to the lower left edge..

Something seems to have brushed across the exposed face of the photodiode and dislodged the wire.

Question:

The new photodiode still has its protective can intact.   Do we need to remove the can and expose the photodiode before istallation?

REFL165 PD has been made from the old 166MHz PD.
As the required inductance was ~10nF level, the stray inductance of the circuit pattern was significant.
So, I am not so confident with the circuit functionality before the optical transfer function test.

I will test REFL33 and REFL165 with the Jenne laser to see how they work.

This REFL165 was good in terms of RF, but I forgot to make the DC path functioning.

I will try some ideas to fix this tomorrow.

REFL165 PD was made and tested. The characterization results are in the PDF file.

Resonance at 166.12MHz
Q of 7.3, transimpedance 667Ohm (Series Resistance = Z/Q² = 2.5Ohm)
shotnoise intercept current = 4.3mA (i.e. current noise of 36pA/rtHz) 

As the circuit pattern had ~10nH level strain inductance, some technique was needed.

• The diode was pushed in so as to reduce the lengths of the legs as short as possible.
• The inductor for the resonant circuit has been located as close to the photodiode as possible
• The other side of the inductor was needed to be bypassed by a large (0.1uF) capacitor, as the original circuit pattern (D1-L5-C33//R22) was too skinny and long.
• C32 is also moved next to the diode.
• The path of the photo current circuit was made thicker by Cu tapes.

Now the size of the loop for the resonant circuit is comparable with the size of SOIC-8 opamp.
(Left-Top corner of the photo)

This improved the resonant gain by factor of 8.5dB at the test with TEST INPUT. (Analyzer photo)

There is no tunable component.
The resonant freq was adjusted by a parallel inductance (270nH) to the main inductor (15nH).

These are the measurements for estimating the amplitude of the signal recorded in the CDS when a known amount of modulated light is incident on the photodiode. 

I mounted the PD characterisation setup onto a small breadboard which could then be placed close AP table.  I then placed position markers for REFL165 on the AP table before moving it onto my small breadboard.  The AM laser was driven by an RF function generator (Fluke 6061A) at a frequency of 165.98866 MHz, which is 102 Hz offset from the 165MHz LO.  The power level was set at -45dBm.  This power level was chosen since anything higher would have saturated the AntiAliasing  Whitening Filters.  The counts in the CDS were converted to voltage using the ADC resolution = 20V per 2^16 counts.

 When the 166MHz power is decreased by a factor of 2 the amplitude of 102Hz wave recorded in CDS goes down by sqrt(2) as expected.   The RF AM power incident on the REFL165 was estimated to be 0.011mW(rms)  (case #1 in the above table)  using the DC power ratio and using the transimpedance of the 1611 BBPD to be 700 Ohms.  This produces a 171 mV amplitude wave at 102 Hz.  I then stepped down the power by factor of 2 and repeated the measurement. 

(These numbers however are not agreeing with the power incident on REFL165 if we assume its transimpedance to be 12500.  It will take a bit more effort to make all the numbers agree.  Will try again tomorrow)

Here is a picture of the small black breadboard on which I have put together the PD characterisation setup.  It would be great if we can retain this portable set up as it is, since we keep reusing it every couple of weeks.  It would be convenient if we can fiber couple the path to the PD under test with a 2m long fiber.  Then we will not have to remove the PD from the optical table while testing it.

 To characterize the RF V to counts we need to know the state of the whitening filter board. Was the filter on or off ? What was the value of the whitening gain slider?

 The filter was ON and the whiterning filter gain was 45dB

REFL165 removed from the table for the C(V) test

The PD was returned on the table.

The C(V) compensation path was modified and the change of the resonant freq was cancelled.
A more precise analysis comes later.

The original REFL165 had ~50MHz/A dependence on the DC photocurrent.
The resistr R21, which was 2670 Ohm contrary to the original drawing, was replaced to 532 Ohm
to increase the feedforward gain by factor of 5.

The resulting dependence is reduced to ~0.5MHz/A although it has Q reduction of ~20% at 6mA.

Some concerns:

These transfer functions were measured between TEST IN and RF OUT while the diode was illuminated with the white light from a light bulb.

There looks some thermal effect on the resonant freq. If the white light illumination is suddenly removed, the bias compensation
is immediately removed but the resonance takes some time (~min) to come back to the original freq.

I am afraid that the light bulb gave too much heat on the surrounding PCB and lead unnecesarily high level dependence of the resonant freq on the DC current.

Or, if this thermal effect comes from the power consumption on the diode itself, we need to characterize it for aLIGO.

In order to check this, we need a test with the 1064nm illumination on the diode in stead of the light bulb.

The transfer function and current noise were measured.  The location of the peak shifts with the amount of incident light power (RF or DC).  The TF was measured at an incident 1064nm light power of 0.4 mW which produced a DC output voltage of 14 mV => DC photocurrent of 0.28 mA. 

Many of the effects that Koji noted in the previous characterization are still present.

In addition I observed a shift of the peak towards lower frequencies as the RF power supplied to the AM Laser (Jenne Laser) is increased.  This could create a dependance of the demodulation phase on incident RF power.

The plots are attached below.

 [Koji, Suresh]

To determine the amount of RF power in the AM laser beam at various RF drive levels I measured the RF power out of the Newfocus 1611 PD while driving the AM laser with a Marconi.  During this measurement the DC output was 2.2V.  With the DC transimpedance of 10^4 and a sensitivity of 0.8 A/W we have carrier power as 0.275 mW (-5.6 dBm).  [Incidentally the measured carrier power with a power meter is about 0.55 mW. Why this discrepancy?]

Estimation of the signal strength at the REFL165 PD:

   From the 40m Sensing Matrix for DRFPMI we see that the signal strength at REFL165 in CARM is about 5x10^4 W/m.  Since we expect about 0.1nm of linear range in CARM length we expect about 0.05 mW of RF power.  If the (DC) carrier power is about 10 mW at the photodiode (18mW is about the max we can have since the max power dissipation is 100 mW in the diode)  then the RF : DC power ratio is 5x10^-3 => -23 dB

As this is lower than the power levels at which the PD transfer function was determined and where we noted the distorsion and shift of the resonance peak, it is likely that these effects may not be seen during the normal operation of the interferometer.

The shift due to the carrier power level (DC) change may still however pose a problem through a changing demodulation phase.