Summary:

My goal was to do some further characterization of the IR ALS system tonight. With POX as an OOL sensor, I measured an RMS displacement noise of  8 pm with the arm under ALS control. I calculated the CARM linewidth to be 77 Hz (=10.3 pm) for the 40m parameters, assuming 30ppm arm loss. Fuurthermore, this number is 3x better than the 24 pm RMS quoted in the Izumi et. al. paper. Of course I am quoting the best results from my efforts tonight. Conclusions:

1. [Attachment #1] --- With XARM locked using POX, the ALS beat noise (i.e. Phase Tracker output noise) lines up well with the reference we have been using for some time now (and indeed, is better in some places).
2. [Attachment #2] --- With the arm locked on ALS and POX as an OOL sensor, I measured performance comparable to this measurement we did sometime last year. Anomalies in this measurement and the one above were what precipitated the IMC noise investigation.
3. [Attachment #3] --- The above two attachments are not the whole story. During the day, I get significantly worse performance (so much so that I couldn't even do the handoff to ALS control). But in 5 minutes of measurement, the ALS noise seems quite stationary.
4. [Attachment #4] --- This is really the same as Attachment #2, but I wanted to overlay some vlines. Maybe this is a clue to some 60 Hz / ground loop issues, but the RMS has significant contribution from these harmonics. Tmrw, I will add the old measurement overlaid to this plot (and for what its worth, the Izumi et. al. spectrum as well).
5. [Attachment #5] --- With the arm under ALS control, I was able to maintain the lock for a solid hour (and more as I write up this elog). Somehow inkscape screwed up the fonts, but main point here is that TRX is stable to within 10% throughout the observation time.

Since the stability and noise seemed quite good, I decided to collect some arm scan data to give to our modeSpec SURFs to practice fitting (which is the short dip in TRX in Attachment #4). Although after the discussion with Rana today, I think it may be that we want to do this measurement in reflection and not transmission, and look for a zero crossing in the PDH signal. In any case, I was able to scan 7 FSRs without any issues. I will upload the data to some git repo. GPS start time is 1208850775, sweep was 3mins long.

I think the next step here is to noise-budget this curve. At least the DFD noises