User:Anthony Salvagno/Notebook/Research/2010/08/12/AOM Analysis: Far Field Studies

After yesterday's many failures, we want to put the AOM a large distance from the laser to see if that has any effect on the system.

Beam Size
We measured the beam size and here are our results:
 * @ ~3in from laser - beam diameter was .4mm
 * @ ~60in from laser - beam diameter was 2.1mm

AOM in far field
We put the AOM at a position where the beam would be 1mm in diameter. I had to look through a bunch of old email where I told Gooch and Housego (still the dumbest company name ever and I feel bad for those two people) that our beam was this size so they could optimize the AOM.

With the AOM at this position (roughly 25in from the laser aperture) we see much less drift than we were seeing previously. We still have that 30 sec ramping effect to deal with but hopefully a new laser and/or a telescope eliminates that. We'll try the lens system tomorrow.