Between 0.5 and 50 Hz, there are a couple of regions where the Rio W laser noise dominates the three corner hat measurement. And, below 0.3 Hz, the Teraxion laser noise dominates the measurement. Today I'm going to try to quiet these two lasers a bit to make a slightly improved three corner hat estimate.

I'll be looking at the output of the delay line frequency discriminator (DFD) on the moku spectrum analyzer, so I've swapped in the 1.9 MHz lowpass filter for the one Rana was using to check the noise out at MHz.

I saved the following traces on an SR785, but with a nonfunctioning GPIB so ended up storing them on a floppy drive.

• Baseline Rio W x Teraxion beat note spectrum, as measured by phasemeter to Moku / SR785
• Beat note spectrum after securing the fibers and Faraday isolators to the table, and moving the Rio W laser to a different operating point. 
• "" after adding a layer of foam atop the fibers
• "" after turning off the HEPA blowers. Noticed several noise lines around 100-300 Hz substantially reduced after turning off the HEPA.

I saw minor improvements to the Rio W x Teraxion beat note spectrum, and took 20 minutes of data for each beat note. Dropbox upload failed several times, so I sent it to my laptop via ipad file storage and airdrop. After swapping fiber connectors and covering with foam, the system took ~15-30 minutes to equilibrate each time (though perhaps longer would have been prudent, since I still saw low frequency drift up to 4 MHz during the 20 min measurement time). No improvement to the estimate on Teraxion laser, and if anything the West laser was even more noisy relative to Rio E and Teraxion, across a wider frequency band (almost the entire band from 30 mHz - 90 Hz). The foam and turning off the HEPA FFU did reduce the noise below 1 Hz, especially for the Rio E x Teraxion beat note. Figure 1 uses maximal averaging for every 2-fold frequency increase, on 20 minutes of data taken today (attachment 2 reproduces the relevant figure from last week's data, without the Marconi reference for better viewing). 

Attachment 3 is the updated Teraxion noise estimate. 

Update: attachment 4 is a comparison of the frequency noise (uncalibrated) for three different configurations: after taping down the fibers, after adding foam, and after turning off the HEPA blowers. I'm not sure why turning off the HEPA blowers increased the noise, maybe should have let the system settle longer? Despite the overall higher noise floor with HEPA blowers off, several peaks between 10 and 100 Hz were reduced.