[Koji, Johannes, gautam]

With Koji's and Johannes' help, I managed to resolve the coupling the pick-off IR beam into the fiber at the X end. I will put up a more detailed elog about how this was done - but in summary, we have about 31% coupling efficiency into the fiber, which isn't stellar, but I felt this was adequate to find a beatnote. Koji also pointed out that the collimation telescope attached to the fiber at the X-end is poorly mounted - this is something to fix when we swap endtables, but this was not addressed right now because if we were to adjust this, we would also have to adjust the mode matching into the fiber.

I then attempted to tune the temperature to find the IR beatnote. While doing so, I noticed some strange features of the controller - there are essentially two display modes relevant to laser crystal temperature, one which allows us to change the setpoint and one which is an actual readback of the temperature (this one can't be adjusted). While tuning the temperature, I noticed that the latter display ("LT") did not change in value. On a hunch, I disconnected the "SLOW" control BNC on the front panel, and voila, I was able to tune the setpoint and observe the measured temperature shift accordingly. I was thus able to find a reasonably strong IR beatnote (-9dBm) at T ~ 44.6 deg C (the beat PD was set to 0dB attenuation, i.e. high gain mode). However, the moment I reconnected the SLOW control BNC, the beatnote vanished (it gradually shifted out of range of the HP network analyzer), and the same thing happens if I terminate the SLOW control BNC connector! I don't understand this behaviour, as the manual says that the range of voltages accepted to this input is +/-10V, so I would assume 0V means do nothing, but clearly this isn't the case, as the beatnote is being shifted in frequency by > 1GHz, and the tuning coefficient is listed as 5GHz/V in the manual. This situation needs further investigation.

Since I had a reasonable IR beatnote setup, I returned the HP analyzer to the control room and tried to see if a green beatnote was present as well - I first ran ASS, then maximized the green transmission using the PZT mirrors, but no beatnote is evident. The contrast isn't great, the ratio of AUX power to PSL power on the green beat PD is something like 5:1, so this probably requires some tuning as well. I will update this elog after today evening's activities...