Reports until 11:46, Tuesday 11 November 2025
H1 General
matthewrichard.todd@LIGO.ORG - posted 11:46, Tuesday 11 November 2025 (88060)
OMC scan with SQZ beam and hot OM2-- 20251111

M. Todd, Kar Meng, S. Dwyer


We took more OMC scans today with OM2 hot. We measured a quadratic mismatch of about 6.8%, but the HG10 peak (misalignment) has enough power that I think this could be an underestimate by a percent or so. 

We struggled a lot to get good measurements at first, though we followed the directions I wrote last time to the letter. So I'm adding some "bewares" for future reference.

1. The OPO IR locked on 0.2 counts when last time we had a level of around 1 count. We didn't catch this right away but this was essentially locking on a 10 mode and sending that to the OMC and it was giving REALLY strange OMC scans. 

2. Once we figured this out, it ensured that we had enough power on the OMC QPDs and the OMA/OMB WFS-DC to get a pretty good centering. Once we ran the OMC scan, we found much better data compared to last week, though we notice here that the 10 peak still has about 50% of the power as the 20 peak (which we're after). This means that the estimate of quadratic mismatch using the P00/(P00+P20+P02) is probably underestimating the mismatch a bit. Note, using the cursors to calculate the power in the peaks means it is just the 00peak/(00peak+20peak) because the power in the 20peak contains both HG20 and HG02 as the OMC has very little astigmatism.

Images attached to this report