The LO beam was found to have a power of 60uW, 10% of the power expected. We are pretty sure about the expectation because the AS beam has a power of 300uW, roughly the expected power. Additionally, the visibility of the MICH fringes in the BHDR is 40%.
If the mode-matching is perfect then we expect the visibility to be 
which is roughly 74.5%.
If there is some mode-mismatch one can show that the visibility is , where is the mode-mismatch.
Using Finesse model I calculated \sqrt(M)=0.93 in the MICH configuration so the expected visibility is around 70%, far away from the observed 40%. To explain the observed visibility the mode mismatch would have to be ~ 30% which is very unlikely.
So it could either be a ghost beam or that the LO beam is clipped so badly that it also degrades its phase front (and therefore the mode-matching). The fact that we see fringes on the LO beam might suggest knife edge clipping on one of the auxiliary optics in the BS chamber. |