[awade]

Good to see this experiment being revived.

1. The design of this laser had a number of flaws and one of them is this sensitivity to backreflections at 532 nm. I mostly just disabled the doubler's lock and closed the shutter for good measure, but probably best not to leave flickering around in an unstable state when you're away.

2. I built in the inversion in the second channel to give myself the option to electronically subtract: something that didn't end up being very practical compared to just digitally recording channels and subtracting in post.

• I'm surprized the SR560 don't given you clearance there.  Nominally these units are 4 nV/rtHz if you operate in low noise mode AND gain=100 (see p21 of the manual), below this gain gives you 10-60 nV/rtHz noise. When I built the PD circuits I did verify that I was getting the clearanceI expected.  At 1 mW on each photodiode one would expect order =sqrt(2*h*c/lambda0*Responisvity*Power)*Gain ~ sqrt(2*6.626e-34*3e8/1064e-9*1e-3*0.7)*2e3 = 32 nV/rtHz.  
• A few things to verify:
  • check the DC voltage (just with a multimeter) to see true power picked up by diodes, this should be 1.4 V for about 1 mW of 1064 nm;
  • Make sure you're AC coupled into SR560, there is no way you operate at gain 100 or above and also not saturate for 1 mW (~1.4 V amp output DC) of light
  • at 2kΩ gain you should expect the noise floor to be of order =sqrt(4*kB*T*G)=sqrt(4*1.38e-23*300*2e3)~5.8 nV.  Only just clear of the SR560 spec, and about equal to typical actual performance.  To see this level you might want to pre-amplify with a Femto amplifier, the 40m Busby box or the ganged amplifier box I made for the CTN lab (its black with gold writing, Anchal knows the one). A dark measrument like this may have a little offset that you can either null or just AC couple with a minicircuits DC block;
  • Take a terminated (50 Ω) measurment of your ADCs when you collect your PD 'dark' data. Even better also collect terminated SR560 data. And put these on the plot.  Moku:Labs have ~30 nV/rtHz @100 kHz and above.  Just be sure you're measure photodetectors and not Pre-amp or ADC noise. Moku nominal input refered noise is 13.9 nV/rtHz * sqrt(1+220kHz/f).
  • If you can't get any quick progress, try all the above with minicircuits lower noise amplifiers.  They have plenty of bandwidth and go to higher frequencies.
• Just measureing the output of the PD directly, with no subtraction or amplification, I'd say you are looking at laser technical noise at about 1 MHz: this is what the subtraction is for, to null the LO noise effects to only listen to signal port.  Maybe somethings burried in the subtracted signal offline, but you need some simultaneous termianated measurements back long the signal chain to put some bonds on what is the limiting noise here.

3. Subtracted noise spectra

• These gain numbers sound right to me.
• The AD829 is designed to drive this combined 150 Ω load, I would stick to 50 Ω terminations for now. On the topic of mokus: again verify its input referred noise and pre-amplify accordingly.  Also there is a choice of "Normal" or "Precision" acquisition mode, I think the right choice is precision (this should have the right filters to kill aliasing from the downsampling)
• ~70 nV/rtHz shot noise sound about right to me.  Not clear why a subtracted signal doesn't seem to reach this.  Once again, measure the actual DC voltage output from the TIA to get the true absorbed photons and use that to calibrate your estimate.  

We should chat some time on zoom about more details (rana can forward my details).  Hope this enought to go on for at least the homodyne part of the experiment.