{Shruti, Yehonathan}

We made some a list of some random questions and plans for the future. We then went down and found answers to some of those:

1. Why is there no Faraday isolator in the 1064nm beam path? (edit: turns out there is, but inside the laser, see pictures in this elog).

2. Do the fibers joined by butt-coupling have similar mode field diameter? If not it can explain many loss issues.

a. In the green path we find that according to the SPDC datasheet the 532nm fiber (coastalcon PM480) is 4um while the input thorlabs fiber (P3-488PM-FC2) coupled to it has an MFD of 3.3um. This mismatch gives maximum coupling efficiency of 96%. Ok not a big issue.

b. At the 1064nm output the SPDC fiber is PM980 with MFD of 6.6um while the BS fiber is 6.2um which is good.

3. What is the green fiber laser damage threshold? According to Thorlabs it is theoretically 1MW/cm^2 practically 250kW/cm^2 for glass air interface. With 3.3um MFD the theoretical damage threshold is ~ 80mW and practically  ~ 20mW. It doesn't sounds like a lot. More so given that we could only get 50% coupling efficiency. How much is needed for observable squeezing? There is the possibility to splice the fiber to an end cap to increase power handling capabilities if needed.

4. Is stimulated Brillouin back scattering relevant in our experiment? According to this rp photonics article not really.

5. How much green light is left after the dichroic mirrors? Is it below the shot noise level? Should check later.

In addition, we found that the green fiber input and the 1064nm fiber output from the SPDC were very dirty! We cleaned them with a Thorlabs universal fiber connector cleaner.