As discussed at the meeting, I decided to calibrate the MC error point into physical units of Hz/rtHz (a.k.a. the PDH discriminant). This is to facilitate the debugging of the hypothesized excess IMC sensing noise. I did this as follows.

1. Trust the POX calibration that was last updated in Aug 2017.
2. Hook up spare DAC channel (piped from LSC rack to 1X2) to IN2 of IMC CM board.
3. Inject excitation into MC error point via "IN2" input of the common board. For an excitation of 30cts with the IN2 gain at -32dB, I was able to see a peak in the calibrated X arm control signal that was ~x10 above the nominal noise level around 150Hz without seeing any nonlinear coupling effects in the DTT spectrum (I'm assuming 150Hz is sufficiently above the UGF of the X arm locking loop such that no loop correction is necessary).
4. Took a spectrum of the IMC error signal, teed off into the SR785 at the I output of the demod board with the same linewidth as the DTT spectrum.
5. Confirmed that without any excitation,
6. Did the math to make these two peaks line up. The resulting calibration is: 13kHz/Vrms.

Math details:

• DTT peak height @ 150 Hz with Hanning window, 25 avgs = 1.97e-4 nm/rtHz (See Attachment #1).
• X arm cavity length = 37.79m, using which the above number becomes 1.47 Hz/rtHz.
• Peak height in SR785 spectrum with Hanning window, 25 avgs = 1.13e-4 Vrms/rtHz (See Attachment #2).
• Dividing, we get 13kHz/Vrms.

Using this, I can now make up a noise budget of sorts for the IMC sensing.

gautam 20180327 4.30pm: I re-checked the PDH error signal calibration using the oscilloscope method. Attachment #3 shows the PDH I and Q error signals and also the output of the RF monitor port, during a TEM00 flash. This attachment should be compared to Attachment #2 of elog 12822, and the answer lines up quite well. From my Finesse model of the IMC, I calculated that the x-axis of the PDH horn-to-horn is ~12.3kHz. Comparing to the top row of Attachment #3, I get a PDH error signal calibration of ~12.4kHz/Vrms, which lines up well with the number quoted above. So I trust my calibration, and hence, the y-axis of my noise budgets in reply to this elog.