Summary:

1. Swapping out the KEPCO HV supplies (linear) I was using for a pair of HP6209s I borrowed from Rich has improved the noise performance somewhat.
2. However, there is still an excess relative to the model. I confirmed that this excess originates from the PA95 part of the circuit (see details).
3. The bypass capacitors don't seem to have any effect on the measured ripple from these HP6209s. Maybe they're internally fitted with some 10uF or similar bypass caps?
4. The production version of this board, with several improvements (after discussions with Koji and Rich), are on the DCC. They're being fabbed right now and will arrive in ~1 week for more bench testing. 

Power supply bypassing [updated 10pm]:

As mentioned earlier in this thread, I prepared a box with two 10uF, 1kV rated capacitors to bypass the high-voltage rails (see inset in the plot), to see if that improves the performance. However, in measuring the voltage ripple directly with the SR785 (no load connected), I don't see any significant difference whether the decoupling caps are connected or not, see Attachment #1. For this, and all other HV measurements made, I used this box to protect the SR785. One hypothesis is that this box itself is somehow introducting the excess noise, maybe because of leakage currents of the diode pair going into the 1Mohm SR785 input impedance, but I can't find any spec for this, and anyway, these diodes should be at ground potential once the transient has settled and the DC blocking capacitor has charged to its final value.

Note that the 10uF caps have an ESR of 7.2 mOhms. The HP6209 has a source impedance "<20mOhm" when operated as a CV source, per the datasheet. So perhaps this isn't so surprising? The same datasheet suggests the source impedance is 500 mOhms from 1kHz to 100 kHz, so we should see some improvement there, but I only measured out to 2 kHz, and I didn't take much effort to reduce these crazy peaks so maybe they are polluting the measurement out there. There must also be some continuous change of impedance, it cannot be <20 mOhm until 1 kHz and then suddenly increase to 500 mOhms. Anyways, for this particular circuit, the nosie DC-1kHz is what is important so I don't see a need to beat this horse more. 

Simplified circuit testing:

I decided to see if I can recover the spec'd voltage noise curve from the PA95 datasheet. For this, I configured the PA95 as a simple G=31 non-inverting amplifier (by not stuffing the 15 uF capacitor in the feedback path). Then, with the input grounded, I measured the output voltage noise on the circuit side of the 25kohm resistor (see inset in Attachment #2). To be consistent, I used the DC blocking box for this measurement as well, even though the output of the PA95 under these test conditions is 0V. Once again, there is considerable excess around ~100 Hz relative to a SPICE model. On the basis of this test, I think it is fair to say that the problem is with the PA95 itself. As far as I can tell, I am doing everything by the book, in terms of having gain > 10, using a sufficiently large compensaiton cap, HV rail decoupling etc etc. Note that the PA95 is a FET input opamp, so the effects of input current noise should be negligible. The datasheet doesn't provide the frequency dependence, but if this is just shot noise of the 1200 pA input bias current (for 300 V rails, per the spec), this is totally negligible, as confirmed by LTspice.

In the spirit of going step-by-step, I then added the feedback capacitor, and still, measured noise in excess of what I would expect from my model + SR785 measurement noise.

Integrated circuit testing:

After the above simplified test, I stuffed a full channel as designed, and tested the noise for various drive currents. To best simulate the operating conditions, an Acromag XT1541 was used to set the DC voltage that determines the drive current through the 25 kohm resistor. The measurements were made on the circuit side of this resistor (I connected a 20ohm resistor to ground to simulate the OSEM). As shown in Attachment #3, the noise with these HP6209 supplies is significantly better than what I saw with the KEPCO supplies, lending further credence to the hypothesis that insufficient PSRR is the root of the problem here. I've added subplots in a few different units - to be honest, I think that reaching this level of measured displacement noise at the 40m at 100 Hz would already be pretty impressive.

So what's next?

The main design change is that a passive R-C-R (4k-3uF-20k) replaces the single 25kohm resistor at the output of the PA95. 

• This allows similar current drive range.
• But adds an LPF to filter out the observerd excess noise at 100 Hz. 

Let's see if this fixes the issue. Not that I've also added a pair of input protection diodes to the input of the PA95 in the new design. The idea is that this would protect the (expensive) PA95 IC from, for example, the unit being powered with the +/- 18V rail but not the +/- 300 V rail. As I type this, however, I wonder if the leakage current noise of these diodes would be a problem. Once again, the datasheet doesn't provide any frequency dependence, but if it's just the shot noise of the 1nA expected when the diodes are not reverse biased (which is the case when the PA95 is operating normally since both inputs are at nearly the same potential), the level is ~20 fA/rtHz, comparable to the input current noise of the PA95, so not expected to be an issue. In the worst case, the PCB layout allows for this component to just be omitted.