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David Notebook: Difference between revisions
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==Daily Log==
'''6/29/15'''
I've been working on more detailed calculations for the mixing efficiency of a cavity redesign--[[File:Modulation_Efficiency.zip|here's some code and generated plots]]. Current limitations of this calculation are that we assume constant intensity inside the cavity (i.e. the waist is very close to the spotsize on the mirrors--this is not a bad assumption for the geometries we're interested in since these tend to be more stable, but could be improved. It's not good for longer cavities especially. This could be corrected by doing some sort of total integrated intensity like in the previous entry). Additionally, the mode-overlap factor between the pump and the stokes and a potentially separate mixing beam is only valid at short cavity lengths (this term should depend on cavity length but we just use a constant multiplicative factor for all lengths). We also have limited knowledge of how locking performance will change with pressure and cavity length--the most we do is in one set of plots just introduce a multiplicative factor for the laser linewidth and cavity linewidth overlap.
The results still suggest a shorter cavity is probably the way to go, but it's unclear how much improvement we'll get. It seems unlikely to be a huge change though--the mixing efficiency scaling--(pressure*length)^2*Pump_intensity*Stokes_intensity--is misleading since increasing the pump power won't linearly increase the pump or stokes intensity and increasing length causes the intensities to drop as does pressure. So the efficiency changes from most of those terms scales more like a square root rather than the square like we hoped.
But we're moving ahead with it. I'm in the process or ordering a 10 inch vacuum chamber in which we'll probably mount a 10 cm cavity and see what happens to us.
'''6/3/15'''
Ok, so here's the deal in more detail. A couple weeks ago I started trying to modulate the HeNe instead of the orange laser, since it's single frequency and easier to detect. It's also comparably low power with about 0.5 mW inside the cavity compared to the 3 mW of the orange laser (but inferior spatial mode) Also since it's CW, I could safely look for the modulated green light. I was hoping to put some sort of bound on what would be detectable since I hadn't seen a hint of single from the modulated orange laser yet. I got the HeNe well mode matched to the cavity and got it polarized correctly (borrowing a beamcube from Nick and just rotating the HeNe barrel). After some work I was able to see green after a grating and iris and some interference filters. I'm pretty confident it was nearly maximized since it was well overlaped with the 780 beam, and that is relatively easy to optimize since I can get a large signal from the modulated beam. I wasn't able to detect an actual signal from the modulated HeNe light though despite trying a few different methods. Some rough calculations showed the noise on the lock-in amplifier was about 10 times as large as the signal I'd expect from the HeNe. That suggests it's unlikely we'll be able to see a modulated signal from the orange laser. Even if we could, we wouldn't be able to bin the power into more than a few wavelength groups, so it wouldn't really do what we wanted.
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