David Notebook: Difference between revisions

'''8/7/14'''

I'm having a hard time getting the Thorlabs photodiode to work. It's noisier and has a smaller sensor. I was previously able to detect a signal with it, but have had trouble the last few days. The UDT sensors one is much easier to work with, but the problem is that it's slower and so doesn't produce square waves when chopping above about 20 Hz. I need square waves so I can properly calculate the power, but there is too much noise at such low frequencies. Presumably the lock-in reading is linear with laser power even with non-square waves, so I'm just going to try to send in a beam with known power to the UDT photodiode and infer the relationship.