Today, Ronic, Daniele, Aurélien and I measured the amplifier power and mirror transmission.

For transmission measurements, we used the same new mirrors as Sbox and ThomX, and installed an iris and a 2-inch mount to block the scattering laser.

The angle of incidence during the measurement was about 0.5°. We changed the angle and the measurements remained the same.

If the mirror being used also has a transmission of 1.75 ppm, the original 270kW is actually 463kW!!! The gain is 6549 and the finesse is 28585 (70% coupling).

We will do more tests to check it.

• Redo the experiment and check the spot behind the window at high power.
• Move the power meter to the plane mirror M2 window. It was previously behind the curved mirror M4 window.
• Compare locking curves, cavity mode sizes, and coupling efficiency at different powers.
• After finishing the high-power experiments, we will measure the finesse using CW laser and the transmission of the mirrors used.

In preparation to measure the output beam profile from the amplifier at high power, I have placed two wedge mirrors just before the beam dump to be able to extract the beam.

One of the wedges was taken from ThomX bunker, also the HR and AR mirrors were taken to plic room in case we might need them

an updated setup is attached  

Beam divergence after amplifier 4.46 mrad

In the last two days, Ronic and I connected the amplifier and locked the cavity.

- We installed an iris on the output to remove a part of the pump.

- We turned on the second stage of the amplifier. When locking, the injected power is 220 mW and the transmitted power after M2 is 26 uW.

- Low gain and coupling efficiency due to bad mode matching and CEP.

Next steps:

- Turn on the third stage of the amplifier, measure the beam parameters, and adjust the telescope.

- Check the adjustment range of AOM frequency that enables the amplifier to operate safely.

- Measure consecutive fundamental mode resonances to determine the direction of AOM frequency tuning.

today with Alice,

- we measured the height of the SBOX windows center : 140mm from the optical table.
- we set the laser fiber colimator exactly at this height.
- we placed 2 mirrors to align the future telescope path at exactly 140mm height along the whole possible travel of the lenses in order to keep them aligned.
the horizontal position is also aligned on this path and a ruler has been placed along this path to help to move the future telescope lenses without misalignment.
- we aligned 2 iris on this path to keep this path axis in case of misalignment.
- we placed 2 iris at the center of the input and output FP-cavity windows.
- we precisely aligned the laser beam on these iris.

in the next days, we need to align the mounts in the SBOX and align also the 2 FP-cavity mirrors.
the output mirror will be a "bad" ThomX 2.24m ROC ULE mirror and the input mirror will be a plan 460ppm Gamma Factory mirror.

The current setup of the optical table attached.

The cavity is aligned and the lock of the fundamental mode has been attempted, but the mode is drifting too quickly to be able to follow.

I have placed the cavity under vacuum for a better stability.

a simple telescope for the CW was adjusted to having 2 lenses of 300 mm placed ~ 250 mm away from the colimator and 200 mm lens placed after it with 510 mm.

closing series

AFM+ InfraRed spectroscopy (IR spectro) has been performed on 400kW S-BOX mirrors.

Seems that XPS made M3 and M4 dirty, but M1 have also ome dust. M2 seems clean, further AFM experiment should show that it is as clean as M1.

29/02/19 - AFM has shown that spots on mirror's surfaces are bumps and not holes.

We had enough time to proceed a quick scan of M2 which has also a hole but not centered on the mirror.

The hole is larger and higher than the one on M1. But the vertical range was to high for the AFM. Then we cannot see if there are sparkles or not on this image. Further study with microscope would be welcome.

AFM has been proceeded on M1 and M2.

The pdf shows the first images taken with the PLIC room Leica microscope (zoom x10 and x80).

Then the hole has been studied with a handmade microscope. It brought a better resolution. We can now see the hole has an edge, a center structure and and extra-hole sparkle (pailleté) structure.

The AFM shows these 3 structures are real. The top of the hole is at ~+1µm and the center ~-2µm compare to the coating surface. The sparkles are ~10nm high and we also found kind of "explosion" desposit while zooming on the sparkles.

The 3D view and profil show perfectly the "crater".

the 2nd stage amplifier needed several hours (4-5h) to reach its nominal power (we look at photodiode level on a scope), instead of the awaited 30 minutes.

could it come from the probable spectrum shifting of the OneFive laser ?
(the power coming from the CVBG, coupled to the fiber, is lower than expected).

Last time, we switched ON directly the 2nd stage at 6A without increasing/decrinsing slowly the current.
today, we switched ON the chiller, switched ON the 1st stage, switch ON the power supply of the 2nd stage at 0A and then we increased slowly the current until 6A... and the problem disappeared.

2nd stage output power was going down. We checked the pump diode technical data sheet and the operating temperature is [25°C:35°C].
We increased the chiller temperature setpoint from 19°C to 23°C. 
Then the output power increased (93mW on 2nd stage photodiode).

today, we measured the 2nd stage CELIA amplifier pump wavelength : 970-990 nm

today we did several test with the Dichroic shortpass mirror (Thorlabs DMSP1000) and with a 10nm optical filter around 1030nm (which works in tranmission at AOI=0).

one used the dichroic mirror in reflection: one should cut the pump @970-990nm and we should keep only the signal @1030nm.
but we still saw plenty spots around the central beam (see the image).
adding the 10nm optical filter on the camera, the image did not change !
then we confirmed the whole signal (centered beam + spots) are well @1030nm.
this spots could be the remaining high order modes of the large fiber used for the 3rd stage of the amplifier.

In June, we encountered some problems regarding the transmission and error signals (see images here), looking as if the laser was switched off before the cavity was filled.

Aurélien, Ronic and I discussed this on 08/27, resulting in a list of tests to perform. We :

- checked the mirrors' thickness (maybe there was some mechanical stress if they were too thick). The mirrors' thickness is 6.35mm (1/4 inch) and is consistent with the mounts size ;

- checked the mirrors' mounts' screws' tightening (maybe the mirrors were either moving if the screws were not tight enough or some mechanical stress if they were too tight). We tightened the mirrors' mounts' upper screws.

Next thing we did with Ronic was check if the error signal depended on the modulation/demodulation relative phase, which was not the case, but it should have.

Ronic added a quarter waveplate before the half waveplate in the injection system.

Today, on 08/29, the succession of the higher-order transverse modes when scanning the seeder laser's piezoelectric actuator's voltage to scan the seeder laser's optical frequency seemed a bit strange, so we checked the resonance frequencies of several occurrences of the same transverse mode :

- (0, 0) : @ -0.4V and 6.0V ;

- (1, 0) and (0, 1) : @0.5V and 6.9V.

In both cases, several occurrences were separated by about 6.4V, which corresponds to the voltage difference to scan a full FSR. The spacing between (0, 0) and (1, 0)/(0, 1) is then about 0.14*FSR.

I checked this by writing a small piece of Python code to calculate the cavity's fundamental transverse mode and its Rayleigh length, which is displayed in Figure 1, and then by calculating the resonance frequencies wrt the (0, 0) resonance frequency for the (1, 0), (0, 1) and (1, 1) transverse modes, which is displayed in Figure 2, with the following formula: $\nu_{p, n, m}=(p+\frac{(n+\frac{1}{2})\arctan(\frac{2L_{\text{cav}}}{z_{\text{R}}})+(m+\frac{1}{2})\arctan(\frac{2L_{\text{cav}}}{z_{\text{R}}})}{2\pi})\times\text{FSR}$ for a $p$ longitudinal and ($n$, $m$) transverse mode. Here, $p=1$. The spacing betwen (0, 0) and (1, 0)/(0, 1) is about 0.11*FSR, making the previous observation consistent with the calculation. Everything seems normal.

Ronic also increased the EOM modulation voltage, increasing the modulation depth for the generation of the error signal (from 100mV RMS to 300mV RMS), making the error signal depend on the modulation/demodulation relative phase, as it should. He managed to lock the laser onto the cavity for about 1s at a time.

Next steps are to optimize the PID parameters and to add a low-pass filter/AOM to cut the higher frequencies off and improve the feedback loop.

Today with Ronic, we changed the FP cavity's mirrors to Layertek (Gamma Factory) mirrors :

- M1 : n°161186 --> fused silica, unknown absorption, unknown diffusion, T1=2500ppm transmission planar mirror ;
- M2 : n°161182 --> fused silica, unknown absorption, unknown diffusion, T2=10ppm transmission, 5m ROC mirror.

RTL (round-trip losses) ~ 2500 + 10 ppm (we forget the unknown parameters for absorption and diffusion).
The maximal finesse we could expect is thus F=π([(1-T1)(1-T2)]^(1/4))/(1-[(1-T1)(1-2)]^(1/2)) ~  2*pi /RTL ≈ 2500 assuming no absorption and no scattering.

The FP cavity's FSR is ≈ 216 MHz given its length.

We managed to see some optical beating on the FP cavity's mirrors and to reach the fundamental transverse mode of the FP cavity by adjusting the injection mirrors, but when scanning the laser's wavelength, some higher-order modes appear and the fundamental mode is reached when the voltage applied to the piezoelectric actuator of the laser's cavity is ≈0V. The actuator is not meant to work with negative voltages, so we translated one of the FP cavity's mirrors so that the fundamental transverse mode's resonance frequency is in the middle of the voltage range.

We also removed the D-shaped mirrors, as they are only useful when working with high power.

At the beginning of the week, I installed a half-wave plate, a beamsplitter cube and a quarter-wave plate, as well as the end-of-cavity mirror, which I unsuccessfully tried to align.

I removed the end-of-cavity mirror and started the laser injection over again with the two motorized mirrors placed in front of the vacuum chamber (but left Ronic's setup as it was).

Today, I aligned the laser by putting an iris on the cavity mirrors' mounts. I tested the repeatability of such a setup, both by removing and putting back the same iris and by using a different iris. The result is in the attached pictures. Is it good enough ?

The mirrors' motors positions are :

- 1 : 3.349670 mm ;

- 3 : 2.060280 mm ;

- 4 : 3.484560 mm ;

- 5 : 3.269710 mm.

Yesterday and today, I replaced the OEWaves CW laser with the NKT CW laser. Its screen does not display anything, so it has to be operated through the GraphiK software.

I then re-aligned the cavity with a new adjustment adaptation tool between the mirror mounts and the irises.

The motor positions are :

- 1 : 3.354420 mm

- 3 : 2.128850 mm

- 4 : 3.468480 mm

- 5 : 3.157300 mm

I then connected the LaseLock module to scan the NKT laser wavelength on a roughly 0-10 V range at a 2Hz rate, so that it could match the cavity's resonance frequency.

Without optimizing the injection, I monitored the transmitted power with a photodiode paired with an amplifier. The pictures are available through this link : https://box.in2p3.fr/s/TGgwkKgYik7MyqW, and an example picture is attached. Their timestamp is in their filenames, and it seems that the transmission varies quite a lot on a ≈10 s scale, and these variations seem to be periodic on a ≈1 minute scale. The peaks seem weirdly wide, almost up to 100-200 MHz (≈FSR).