Backscattering reflectivity of the 3rdOMC was measured.
Attached: Measurement setup
1) A CVI 45P 50:50 BS was inserted in the input beam path. This BS was tilted from the nominal 45 deg so that the reflection of the input beam is properly dumped.
This yielded the reflectivity of the BS deviated from 45deg. The measured BS reflectivity is 55%+/-1%.
2) The backward propagating beam was reflected by this BS. The reflected beam power was measured with a powermeter.
3) The powermeter was aligned with the beam retroreflected from the REFL PDH and the iris in the input path. The iris was removed during the measurement
as it causes a significant scatter during the measurement.
4) While the cavity was either locked or unlocked, no visible spot was found at the powermeter side.
The input power to the OMC was 14.6mW. The detected power on the powermeter was 66.0+/-0.2nW and 73.4+/-0.3nW with the cavity locked and unlocked, respectively.
This number is obtained after subtraction of the dark offset of 5.4nW.
Considering the reflectivity of the BS (55+/-1%) , the upper limit of the OMC reflectivity (in power) is 8.18+/-0.08ppm and 9.09+/-0.09ppm for the OMC locked and unlocked respectively. Note that this suggests that the REFL path has worse scattering than the OMC cavity but it is not a enough information to separate each contribution to the total amount.
Impact on the OMC transmission RIN in aLIGO:
- The obtained reflectivity (in power) was 8ppm.
- For now, let's suppose all of this detected beam power has the correct mode for the IFO.
- If the isolation of the output faraday as 30dB is considered, R=8e-9 in power reaches the IFO.
- The IFO is rather low loss when it is seen as a high reflector from the AS port.
- Thus this is the amount of the light power which couples to the main carrier beam.
When the phase of the backscattered electric field varies, PM and AM are produced. Here the AM cause
the noise in DC readout. Particularly, this recombination phase is changing more than 2 pi, the fringing
between the main carrier and the backscattered field causes the AM with RIN of 2 Sqrt(R).
Therefore, RIN ~ 2e-4 is expected from the above of backscattering.
Now I'm looking for some measurement to be compared to with this number.
First, I'm looking at the alog by Zach: https://alog.ligo-la.caltech.edu/aLOG/index.php?callRep=8674
I'm not sure how this measurement can be converted into RIN. Well, let's try. Zach told me that the measured value is already normalized to RIN.
He told me that the modulation was applied at around 0.1Hz. The maximum fringe velocity was 150Hz from the plot.
At 100Hz, let's say, the RIN is 2e-6 /rtHz. The fringe speed at 100Hz is ~70Hz/sec. Therefore the measurement stays in the 100Hz freq bin
only for delta_f/70 = 0.375/70 = 5.3e-3 second. This reduces the power in the bin by sqrt(5.3e-3) = 0.073.
2e-6 = 2 sqrt(R) *0.73 ==> R = 2e-10
This number is for the combined reflectivity of the OMC and the OMC path. Assuming 30dB isolation of the output Faraday
and 20% transmission of SRM, the OMC reflectivity was 5e-6. This is in fact similar number to the measured value.
If I look at the OMC design document (T1000276, P.4), it mentions the calculated OMC reflection by Peter and the eLIGO measurement by Valera.
They suggests the power reflectivity of the order of 1e-8 or 1e-7 in the worst case. This should be compared to 8ppm.
So it seems that my measurement is way too high to say anything useful. Or in the worst case it creates a disastrous backscattering noise.
So, how can I make the measurement improved by factor of 100 (in power)
- Confirm if the scattering is coming from the OMC or something else. Place a good beam dump right before the OMC?
- Should I put an aperture right before the power meter to lmit the diffused (ambient) scatter coming into the detector?
For the same purpose, should I cover the input optics with an Al foil?
- Is the powermeter not suitable for this purpose? Should I use a PD and a chopper in front of the OMC?
It is quite tight in terms of the space though.
- Any other possibility? |