I went over to Downs today and was able to secure two 8 core machines, along with mounting rails.  These are very thin looking 1U chassis computers. I was told by Rolf the big black box computers might be done tomorrow afternoon.  Alex also kept one of the 8 core machines since he needed to replace a hard drive on it, and also wanted to keep for some further testing, although he didn't specify how long.

I also put in a request with Alex and Rolf for the RCG system to produce code which includes memory location hooks for plant models automatically, along with a switch to flip from the real to simulated inputs/outputs.

Recorded transfer functions for the 1cm Si-PD as described on p. 2708

for different biases. I put the plots in there, to keep the info in one place,

where the label on the PD case (which Steve made without asking him) points

to.

I talked to some people recently about the fact that the responsivity (A/W) of the PD

changes even at DC for different biases. I tested this again and should be more precise about this:

The first time I observed this was in the transfer functions as shown on p. 2708.

With 'DC' I meant 'low frequency' there, as you can still see an effect of the bias as low as 100kHz.

Then at one point I saw the responsivity changing with bias also at true DC.

However, it turned out that this is only the case if the photocurrent is too high.

If the photocurrent is 4mA, you need 400mV bias to get the max. responsivity.

For 2mA photocurrent, the responsivity is already maximal for 0V bias.

An effect for relative low frequencies remains however.

The DC check of responsivity was done with white light from a bulb.

Kiwamu and I measure the PZT response of the Innolight this evening from 24 kHz to 2MHz.  

We locked the PLL at ~50 MHz offset using the Lightwave NPRO and and swept the Innolight with the network analyzer (using the script I made; it has one peculiar property, but it does work correctly).  

We will post the plot of the Lightwave PZT response tomorrow morning.

**EDIT**: As Koji pointed out, the calibration factor on this plot is WRONG.  See my more recent update for the correctly calibrated plot.

The shape of the TF looks nice but the calibration must be wrong.

Suppose 1/f slope with 10^-4 rad/V at 100kHz. i.e. m_pm = 10/f rad/V
This means m_fm = 10 Hz/V. This is 10^6 times smaller than that of LWE NPRO.

(Edit: Corrected some numbers but it is not significant)

 Koji is absolutely right.  I just double checked my matlab code, and saw that I divided when I should have multiplied.  The correctly calibrated plots are attached here for the Innolight and the lightwave.  Kiwamu and I will measure the amplitude and the jitter today.

Innolight: 100rad/V @ 100kHz  => 1e7/f rad/V => 10MHz/V

LWE: 500rad/V @ 100kHz =>  5e7/f rad/V => 50MHz/V

They sound little bit too big, aren't they?

The Lightwave NPRO should be around 5 MHz/V. 

The Innolight PZT coefficient is ~1.1 MHz/V.

(both are from some Rick Savage LHO elog entries)

just a few infos on Silicon PDs I looked up.

If you want to go beyond the 100MHz achievable with the device I worked on,

the one thing to improve is the opamp, where Steve is trying to find OPA657.

This is a FET with 1.6GHz BWP, minimum stable gain of 7, and 4.8nV/rt(Hz) noise.

Should be ok with 750-1000 Ohm transimpedance.

The other thing you might want to change is the PD

(although it might be the 1cm PD with high bias is as fast as smaller ones with lower bias).

There are two types of other Si diodes at the 40m right now (~3mm):

-Rana and I found a Centronic OSD 15-5T in the old equipment

-Frank gave me a Hamamatsu S1223-01 on a Thorlabs pre-amp device (could be taken out).

The Centronic OSD 15-5T has up to 80pF with 12 V bias according to the datasheet.

The Hamamatsu S1223-01 is stated with 20pF only, but stated to have a max. frequency resp. of 20MHz ('-3db point').

I dont know what this means, as the corner freq. of 10pF into 50Ohm is still 160MHz.

In any case there are faster 3mm types to start with, as for example Hamamatsu S3399 (~ 90$),

which is stated to have the corner at 100MHz with 50 Ohm load.

For this type the stated capacity (20pF) looks consistent with ~100MHz corner into 50 Ohm.

So probably you can get higher BW with this one using much smaller load, as in transimpedance stage.

Steve and Koji

- We removed old ITMX/Y from the chambers. Now they are temporarily placed on the flow table at the end. Steve is looking for nice storages for the 5inch optics.

- We wiped new ITMX/Y by isopropanol as they were dusty.

- We put them into the corresponding towers. Checked the balancing and magnet arrangements with the OSEMs. They were totally fine.

- We clamped the mirrors by the EQ stops. Wrapped the towers by Al foils.

Tomorrow we will put them into the chambers.

 We realized that we had measured the wrong calibration value; we were using the free-running error signal with the marconi far from the beat frequency, which was very small.  When we put the Marconi right at the beat, the signal increased by a factor of ~12 (turning our original calibration of 10 mV/rad into 120 mV/rad).  The re-calibrated plots are attached. 

Innolight 10 rad/V @ 100kHz => 1e6/f rad/V => 1MHz/V

LWE 30 rad/V @ 100kHz => 3e6/f rad/V => 3MHz/V

---------

BTW, don't let me calculate the actuator response everytime.

The elog (=report) should be somewhat composed by the following sections

Motivation - Method - Result (raw results) - Discussion (of the results)

 We measured the Amplitude Modulation response of the PZTs, to find regions with large phase modulation but small amplitude modulation.

We did this by blocking 1 arm of the PLL, feeding the source output of the Network Analyzer into the PZT input of the laser in question, and reading the output of the PD on the NA.  We calibrated by dividing by the DC voltage of the PD (scaled by the ratio of the AC gain to DC gain of the New Focus PD).

The AM response of the Innolight looks fairly smooth up to ~1MHz, and it is significantly below the PM response for most of its range.  The region between 20 and 30 kHz shows very good separation of about 10^3 rad/RIN (and up to 10^5 rad/RIN at ~21.88 kHz, where there is the negative spike in the AM response). The region between 1.5 MHz and 2MHz also looks viable if it is desirable to actuate at higher frequencies.

The Lightwave offers very good AM/PM separation up to about 500 kHz, but becomes quite noisy about 1MHz.

I made a simple PD test circuit which may allow to test PD response up to few 100MHz.

Its not for low noise, only for characterising PD response.

Here is the circuit:

The 2 capacitor values (for bypassing) are kind of arbitrary, just what I found around

(one medium, one small capacity). Could be improved by better RF types (e.g. Mica).

The PD type has no meaning. I put in the Centronic 15-T5 for a start.

The bias can be up to 20V for this diode.

The signal appears across R1. It is small, to make a large bandwidth.

R2 is just for slightly decoupling the signal from the following RF amplifier.

The wire into the RF amplifier is short (~cm). And the amplifier is supposed to have 50 Ohm

input impedance.

I use a mini circuits ZFL 500 here.

power supply for this is 15V.

i just restarted the elog for the third time in the past 12 hours.

I checked the elog.log file to debug the problem. It doesn't contain eveidence of any particular cause, except for png/jpg file uploads happened last night.

I'm not sure we can blame Image Magic again because the last crash seems to be occurred just after an entry with e jpg picture was included in the body of the message. I think Image Magic is used only for previews of attachments like pdfs or ps.

Maybe we should totally disable image magic.

These are the dark noise spectrum that I measured on the 11MHz and 55MHz PD prototypes I modified.

The plots take into account the 50Ohm input impedance of the spectrum analyzer (that is, the nosie is divided by 2).

With an estimated transimpedance of about 300Ohm, I would expect to have 2-3nV/rtHz at all frequencies except for the resonant frequencies of each PD. At those resonances I would expect to have ~15nV/rtHz (cfr elog entry 2760).

Problems:

1. For the 55MHz PD the resonance peak is too small
2. In the 55 MHz: noise is present at about 7MHz
3. In the 11MHz PD there's a lot of noise below 10 MHz.

I have to figure out what are the sources of such noises.

Suggestions?

I was checking into the Guralp situation today. I put the rubber balls underneath the granite block (the Q is too high), but found unfortunately that Jenne's styrofoam box is too short to cover the Guralps on top of the granite. If the box was skinny enough to fit on the block or taller by ~6 inches, it would be perfect. We need some new Seismo boxes.

Here's the story of the Gur2 noise so far. We need to pull out and repair the breakout box.

1) At some point we noticed that the Guralp2 X channel was behaving badly.

2) Steve tried recentering with just a +12V supply - this didn't work. Jenne then centered it using the +/- 12V supply. This was OK.

3) Around noon on March 24, the channel 'goes bad' again.

4) On the afternoon of the 25th, most of the channels go to zero, but the GUR2X channel stays bad. There's NO ENTRY in the elog about this. This is UNACCEPTABLE. Apparently, the seismometers were disconnected without shutting off the power to the box. You MUST elog everything - otherwise, go home and sit on your hands.

5) On the evening of the 31st, Steve turns off the Guralp breakout box. From the trend, you can see that the signals all go to zero at that time.

6) From then until today, there is no noise in the GUR2X channel. From these tests we can guess that the problem is in the GUR2X channel of the breakout box, but not in the AA Chassis or the ADC, since those showed no excess noise with the box turned OFF. Its hard to be sure without elog entries, but I assume that 3/25-3/31 was a 'seismometer disconnected', but 'box on' state.

Large earthquake shakes Baja California, Mexico and 6 over Magnitude 5 aftershakes follow.  The frontend computers are still down since Friday.

Steve and Koji (Friday, Apr 02)

Summary

Intsallation of ITMs are going on. Two new ITMs were placed on the optical table in the vacuum chambers. ITM for the south arm was put at the right place in accordance to the CAD drawing. ITM for the east arm is still at a temporaly place.

Tower placement (10:30-11:30)

- Put the tower on the table at a temporary place such that we can easily work on the OSEMs.

ITM (South arm) (14:00-16:30)

- Put the tower on the table at a temporary place such that we can easily work on the OSEMs.

- Leveled the table approximately.

- Released the EQ stops

- Removed anchors for the OSEM cables as it was too short. The wire distribution will be changed later.

- Put the OSEMs. Adjust the insertion to the middle of the OSEM ranges.

- Clamped the EQ stops again

- Placed the tower to the right place according to the CAD drawing.

- Released the EQ stops again.

- Check the OSEM values. The LL sensor showed small value (~0.5). Needs to be adjusted.

ITM (South) damping adjustment

- Found the signs for the facing magnets are reversed.

- Otherwise it damps very well.

After adding an inductor L=100uH and a resistor R=10Ohm in parallel after the OP547A opamp that provide the bias for the photodiode of REFL11, the noise at low frequency that I had observed, was significantly reduced.

See this plot:

A closer inspection of the should at 11MHz in the noise spectrum, showed some harmonics on it, spaced with about 200KHz. Closing the RF cage and the box lid made them disappear. See next plot:

The full noise spectrum looks like this:

A big bump is present at ~275MHz. it could important if it also shows up on the shot noise spectrum.

 The cabling on the seismic stack was rerouted so it could reach the south edge of the table: the cables  were removed from the viton padded clamps and repositioned this morning.

ITM-south tower's earthquake screw viton tips could be a little bit larger. They do not stay in their screw hole after a hard clamping action.

4-40 earthquake screws under the test mass:viton tips can fall out without action, the treads are cross threaded so the screws are wobbling

This morning, at about 12 Koji found all the front-ends down.

At 1:45pm rebooted ISCEX, ISCEY, SOSVME, SUSVME1, SUSVME2, LSC, ASC, ISCAUX

Then I burtestored ISCEX, ISCEY, ISCAUX to April 2nd, 23:07.

The front-ends are now up and running again.

 I restored damping to all SUSes except ITM-east. The ITMX OSEMs are being used in the clean assembly room.

Lately I've been trying to sort out the problem of the discrepancy that I noticed between the values read on the spectrum analyzer's display and what we get with the GPIB interface.

It turns out that the discrepancy originates from the two data vector that the display and the GPIB interface acquire. Whereas the display shows data in "RAW" format, the GPIB interface, for the way the netgpibdata script is written, acquires the so called "error-corrected data". That is the GPIB downloaded data is postprocessed and corrected for some internal calibration factors of the instrument.

 I noticed that someone, that wasn't me, has edited the wiki page about the netgpibdata under my name saying:

 " [...]

* A4395 Spectrum Units
Independetly by which unites are displayed by the A4395 spectrum analyzer on the screen, the data is saved in Watts/rtHz"

Kiwamu and Koji

ITMY (south) was aligned with regard to the 40m-long oplev with the green laser pointer. Now the cavity is waiting for the green light injected from the end table

Some tools and the level gauge were removed from the table.

BAD news: I could clearly see scatter of the green beam path because of the dusts in the arm tube. Also many dusts are seen on the ITM surface.

Picture of the ETM - reflection from the ITM is hitting the mirror and the suspension structures.

1. Shoot the ITM center with the green beam.

- Two persons with walkie-talkies required for this work.

- Turn on the end green pointer. We could see the long trace of the beam sliced by the beam tube wall.

- Look at the tube peeping mirror for the CCD.

- Adjust yaw such that the beam trace on the tube wall is parallel to the arm.

- Adjust pitch such that the beam trace on the tube gets longer. This means that spot gets closer to the ITM.

- Continue pitch adjustment until some scatter appears on the ITM tower.

- Once the spot appears on the tower, you can easily adjust it on the mirror

2. Adjust pitch/yaw bias such that the reflection hits the ETM.

- Initially the ITM alignment is totally bad. ==> You clealy see the spot on the wall somewhere close to the ITM.

- Adjust pitch/yaw bias such that the spot goes farther as far as possible.

- Once you hit the suspension tower, the scatter is obviously seen from the peeping mirror.

- You can match the incident beam and the scattering of the reflection. You also can see the reflection from the ETM towards the ITM as the spot size gets huge (1/2 tube diameter).

- We found that the bias is ~-2 for pitch and ~-6 for yaw.

3. Go into the chamber. Check the table leveling.

- Open the light door.

- I found that the table is not leveled. Probably it drifted after the move of the weight (i.e. MOS removal).

- Removed one of the round-shaped weight. Moved the other weights such that the table was leveled.

4. Remove the bias for yaw and rotate suspension tower such that the reflection hit the center of the ETM.

- Removed the yaw bias. This makes the reflected spot totally off from the ETM.

- Rotate suspension tower so that the beam can approximately hit the ETM.

- Look at the peeping mirror, the beam is aligned to the ETM.

5. Adjust OSEMs

- Push/pull the OSEMs such that we have the OSEM outputs at the half of the full scale.

6. Adjust alignment by the bias again.

- Moving OSEMs changes the alignment. The pitch/yaw biases were adjusted to have the beam hitting on the ETM.

- Bias values at  the end of the work: Pitch -0.8159 / Yaw -1.2600

7. Close up the chamber

- Remove the tools and the level gauge.

- Close the light door.

#
#                 gnd
#                 |
#                 Cw2
#                 |
#                 n23
#                 |
#                 Lw2
#                 |
#   gnd           n22
#   |             |
#   Rip           Rw2
#   |             |                   |\
#   nt- Rsi-n2- - - C2 - n3 -  - -  - |  \
#            |    |      |   |        |4106>-- n5 - Rs -- no                                                            
# iinput    Rd   L1     L2 R24    n6- |  /     |           |
#    |- nin- |    |      |   |    |   |/       |         Rload
#           Cd   n7     R22 gnd   |            |           |
#            |    |      |        | - - - R8 - -          gnd
#           gnd  R1     gnd      R7
#                 |               |
#                gnd             gnd
#
#
#

What??? I don't see any gray trace of Rs in the plot. What are you talking about?

Anyway, if you are true, the circuit is bad as the noise should only be dominated by the thermal noise of the resonant circuit.

From the measurements of the 11 MHz RFPD at 11Mhz I estimated a transimpedance of about 750 Ohms. (See attached plot.)

The fit shown in the plot is: Vn = Vdn + sqrt(2*e*Idc) ; Vn=noise; Vdn=darknoise; e=electron charge; Idc=dc photocurrent

The estimate from the fit is 3-4 times off from my analsys of the circuit and from any LISO simulation. Likely at RF the contributions of the parassitic components of each element make a big difference. I'm going to improve the LISO model to account for that.

The problem of the factor of 2 in the data turned out to be not a real one. Assuming that the dark noise at resonance is just Johnson's noise from the resonant circuit transimpedance underestimates the dark noise by 100%.

Putting my hands ahead, I know I could have taken more measurements around the 3dB point, but the 40m needs the PDs soon.

Something must be wrong. 

1. Physical Unit is wrong for the second term of "Vn = Vdn + Sqrt(2 e Idc)"

2. Why does the fit go below the dark noise?

3. "Dark noise 4 +/- NaN nV/rtHz"   I can not accept this fitting.

Also apparently the data points are not enough.

 1) True. My bad. In my elog entry (but not in my fit code) I forgot the impedance Z= 750Ohm (as in the fit) of the resonant circuit in front of the square root: Vn = Vdn + Z * sqrt( 2 e Idc )

2) That is exactly the point I was raising! The measured dark noise at resonance is 2x what I expect.

I also admitted that the data points were few, especially around the 3dB point.

Today I'm going to repeat the measurement with a new setup that lets me tune the light intensity more finely.

I measured a jitter modulation caused by injection of a signal into laser PZTs.

The measurement has been done by putting a razor blade in the middle way of the beam path to cut the half of the beam spot, so that a change of intensity at a photodetector represents the spatial jitter of the beam.

However the transfer function looked almost the same as that of amplitude modulation which had been taken by Mott (see the entry).

This means the data is dominated by the amplitude modulation instead of the jitter. So I gave up evaluating the data of the jitter measurement.

 Here's another measurement of the noise of the REFL11 PD.

This time I made the fit constraining the Dark Noise. I realized that it didn't make much sense leaving it as a free coefficient: the dark noise is what it is.

Result: the transimpedance of REFL11at 11 MHz is about 4000 Ohm.

Currently, the y end plant is yep.mdl.  In order to compile it properly (for the moment at least) requires running the normal makefile, then commenting out the line in the makefile which does the parsing of the mdl, and rerunning after modifying the /cds/advLigo/src/fe/yep/yep.c file.

The modifications to the yep.c file are to change the six lines that look like:

"plant_mux[0] = plant_gndx"  into lines that look like "plant_mux[0] = plant_delayx".  You also have to add initialization of the plant_delayx type variables to zero in the if(feInt) section, near where plant_gndx is set to zero.

This is necessary to get the position feedback within the plant model to work properly.

#NOTE by Koji

CAUTION:
This entry means that Makefile was modified not to parse the mdl file.
This affects making any of the models on megatron.

 The elog crashed when I was uploading a photo just now. I logged into nodus and restarted it.

Data looks perfect ... but the fitting was wrong.

Vn = Vdn + Z * sqrt( 2 e Idc ) ==> WRONG!!!

Dark noise and shot noise are not correlated. You need to take a quadratic sum!!!

Vn^2 = Vdn^2 + Z^2 *(2 e Idc)

And I was confused whether you need 2 in the sqrt, or not. Can you explain it?
Note that you are looking at the raw RF output of the PD and not using the demodulated output... 

Also you should be able to fit Vdn. You should put your dark noise measurement at 10nA or 100nA and then make the fitting.

Koji

ITMX was aligned with regard to the 40m green oplev.
Now both cavities are aligned.

Next thing we are going to do is to remove PRM and SRM towers.

As well as the oplev construction for ITMs.

We anticipate the drift of the stack. So we need to revisit the alignment again.

Some tools and the level gauge were removed from the table.

Picture of the ETMX - reflection from the ITMX is hitting the mirror and Jamie's windmill.

0. The suspension tower had been placed on the table close to the door.

1. Brought the OSEMs from the clean room. Connected the satellite box to the ITMX suspension.

2. Went into the chamber. Leveled the table.

3. Released the mirror from the clamp. Put and adjust the OSEMs.

- Note that the side OSEM is located to the south side of the tower
  so that we can still touch it after the placement of the TT suspension at the north side of the SOS tower.

4. Clamped the mirror. Moved the SOS tower according to the CAD layout.

5. Leveled the table again.

6. Released the mirror again and adjusted the OSEMs.

7. Turned on the end green laser pointer.

- The spot was slightly upside and left of the mirror. Adjusted it so that the spot is at the center.

8. Align ITMX in Pitch

- The spot was hitting the tube. Moved the pitch bias such that the beam get horizontal.

9. Align ITMX in Yaw

- Moved the SOS tower such that the approximate spot is on the ETMX. If I hit the right spot I could see the tube get grown green because of the huge scatter.

10. Adjusted the OSEMs again and check the alignment again. Repeated this process 2~3 times.

- Bias values at  the end of the work: Pitch 0.7800 / Yaw 0.270

11. Close up the chamber

- Remove the level gauge. Some of the screws are still in the Al ship in the chamber.

- Close the light door.

 To prevent this confusion in the future, at Koji's suggestion I've created a Makefile.no_parse_mdl in /home/controls/cds/advLIGO on megatron.  The normal makefile is the original one (with correct parsing now).  So the correct procedure is:

1) "make yep"

2) Modify yep.c code

3) "make -f Makefile.no_parse_mdl yep"

 I redid the PZT Phase Modulation measurement out to 5 MHz for both the Innolight and the Lightwave.  The previous measurement stopped at 2MHz, and we wanted to see if there were any sweet spots above 2MHz.  I also reduced the sweep bandwidth and increased the source amplitude at high frequency to reduce the noise (the Lighwave measurement, especially, was noise dominated above 1MHz).  I also plotted the ratio of PM/AM in rad/RIN, since this is the ultimate criterion on which we want to make a determination.

It looks like there is nothing extremely useful above 2MHz for either laser.  There are several candidates for the lightwave at about 140 kHz and again at about 1.4 MHz.  The most compelling peak, however, is in the innolight at 216 kHz, where the peak is about 2.3e5 rad/RIN.

Below about 30kHz, the loop suppresses the measurement, so one should focus on the region above there.

Bob, Steve, and Koji

We opened North heavy door of the BS chamber in the afternoon.

In the evening, Koji worked on the PRM/SRM removal.

- Cleaned up the OPLEV mirrors to create some spaces near the door.

- Clamped PRM/SRM.

- Removed OSEMs. Made a record of the OSEMs. The record is on the wiki (http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Upgrade_09/Suspensions)

- Found the SOSs are quite easy to remove from the table as they are shorter than the MOSs.

- Put a new Al sheet on a wagon. Put the SOSs on it. Wrapped them by the Al foils.

- Carried it to the clean room. They are on the right flow bench. Confirmed the wires are still fine.

- Closed up the chamber putting a light door.

The 1979 vintage RF spectrum analyzer HP4195A  sn2904J01587 shipped out  for repair today to http://www.avalontest.com

It has a 25 MHZ oscillation when you go  below 150 MHZ in your sweep....atm1 with the larger amplitude shows this 25 MHZ

Atm2 is displaying  full sweep-sign scans from 1 to 500 MHZ.....here one can clearly see the three segment of the scan:

1, large amplitude 25 MHZ oscillation dominating the spectrum up to 150 MHZ

2, the mid section from 150 MHZ  to 300 MHZ with medium size amplitude is normal

3, from 300 MHZ to 500 MHZ the amplitude is decreasing.......showing the disadvantage of using a 300 MHZ oscilloscope

I pulled the Guralp breakout box from the rack, and it's sitting on the EE bench here.  The game plan is to check out the Gur2X channel.  

Rana and Steve have been investigating, and found that the X channel has been funky (which has been known for ~a month or two) when the seismometer has been plugged in, and also when the seismometers have been unplugged, but the box is left on.  The funkyness goes away when the box is turned off.  Since it's not there when the box is off, it seems that it's not a problem with the cable from the box to the ADC, or in the ADC channel.  Since it is there when the box is on, but the seismometer is unplugged, it's clear that it's probably in the box itself.  

Preliminarily, I've connected a set of BNC clipdoodles to the input testpoints, and another set to the output.  They're both connected to a 'scope (which is on it's battery so it's not connected to any Ground), and when I tap on the circuit board the input trace is totally unchanged, but the output trace goes kind of crazy, and gets more fuzzy, and picks up a DC offset.  Koji is concerned that some of the big capacitors may have an iffy connection to the board. 

Investigations will continue Monday morning. 

Steve and Koji

We aligned the peeping mirrors to look at the surface of the ITMs.
They had been misligned as we move the positions of the ITMs, but now they are fine.

NOTE: This measurement is wrong and only remains for documentation purposes.

Koji asked me to take a profile of the output of the 1W NPRO that will be used for green locking. I used the razor-scan method, plotting the voltage output of a PD vs the position of the razor across the beam, both vertically and horizontally. This was done at 6 points along the beam path out of the laser box.

I determined the beam spot size at each point by doing a least-squares fit on the plots above in Matlab (using w as one of the fitting parameters) to the cumulative distribution functions (error functions) they should approximate.

I then did another least-squares fit, fitting the above "measured" beam profiles to the gaussian form for w vs z. Below is a summary.

It seems reasonable, though I know that M² < 1 is fishy, as it implies less divergence than ideal for that waist size. Also, like Koji feared, the waist is inside the box and thus the scan is almost entirely in the linear regime.

There is a clearly a difference in the divergence angle of the x and y beams - maybe 10-20%. Since the measurements are outside the Rayleigh range and approximately in the linear regime, the slope of the divergence in this plot should be inversely proportional to the waists - meaning the x- and y- waist sizes should differ by about 10-20%. You should check your fitting program for the waist.

Jenne, Koji and I opened up the package from Raicol and examined the crystals under the microscope. The results were mixed and are summarized below. There are quite a few scratches and there is residue on some of the polished sides. There is a large chip in one and there appear to be gaps or bands in the AR coatings on the sides.

There are two albums on Picassa

1. The package is opened ...

2. The crystals under the microscope.

Koji and Kevin

We unpacked the Innolight 2W laser, took an inventory, and scanned the operations manual.

[Edit by KA]

The scanned PDFs are placed on the following wiki page

http://lhocds.ligo-wa.caltech.edu:8000/40m/Upgrade_09/PSL

We will measure the P-I curve, the mode profile, frequency actuator responses, and so on.