A follow-up on the discussion from today's lunch meeting - Rana pointed out that rotation of the fiber in the mount by ~5degrees cannot account for such large power fluctuations. Here is a 3 day trend from my polarization monitoring setup. Assuming the output fiber coupler rotates in its mount by 5 degrees, and assuming the input light is aligned to one of the fiber's special axes, then we expect <1% fluctuation in the power. But the attached trend shows much more drastic variations, more like 25% in the p-polarization (which is what I assume we use for the beat, since the majority of light is in this polarization, both for PSL and EX). I want to say that the periodicity in the power fluctuations is ~12hours, and so this fluctuation is somehow being modulated by the lab temperature, but unfortunately, we don't have the PSL enclosure temperature logged in order to compare coherence.

Steve: your  plots look like temperature driven

The "beat length" of the fiber is quoted as <=2.7mm. This means that a linearly polarized beam that is not oriented along one of the special axes of the fiber will be rotated through 180 degrees over 2.7mm of propagation through the fiber. I can't find a number for the coefficient of thermal expansion of the fiber, but if temperature driven fluctuations are changing the length of the fiber by 300um, it would account for ~12% power fluctuation between the two polarizations in the monitoring setup, which is in the ballpark we are seeing...