26 Oct 21, Tue

Yesterday while the power was out I turned off laser drivers and other powered electronics that I could think of. When the power was back I rebooted the computers (checked that I was able to ssh into cymac) and the electronics that I had turned off. I noted that the cavity was back on resonance as indicated by the forest of peaks that we were seeing.

Today when I returned to the lab the forest was missing and Aaron noticed that the cantilever seemed to be tilted in the clamp. Attachment 1 shows the exact angle at which it was found. A small part at the end is chipped off but it otherwise appears usable to me.

Attachment 1: The cantilever at the angle at which it had tilted to with the chipped bits, after just removing the top piece of the clamp.

Before re-clamping, we (Aaron and I) decided to use a variable torque socket wrench to test for optimal clamping torques on another sacrificial cantilever. I decided to abandon this experiment after Rana pointed out at the group meeting that this would not give any really reliable number for the required clamping torque since breakage torques may have a wide range of random values for different cantilevers.

28 Oct 21, Thu

Attachment 2: Mobile phone image (without external lens) of the cantilever's clamping surface. It shows some pits and scratches, one larger than 100 microns.

For reference, the dimensions of the clamping area are 1cm x 1cm.

Attachment 3: The clamping surface of the smaller (top, while clamping) piece of the clamp, that contains the indentation where the cantilever sits.