Cleaving & Splicing

This evening, Yuqiang showed me how to cleave and splice fibers. I wanted to add a filter before the photodetector to reduce the laser beam power. The Thorlabs tech support guy told me that, although the manual says the damage threshold is 70mW, the detector gets fried with 60mW. Michael got me a small double lens stage with fibered connections. I had to splice my laser fiber onto the stage. The first splice didn't work so well but my second go was perfect.
I received the new photodetector before I went down to Tyndall (I convinced the Thorlabs tech support that the detector was broken before I got at it!). I had a suspicion that the laser power had killed the ball lens in the detector, but it didn't really make sense because I wasn't getting the correct voltage response on the oscilloscope even below the current (lasing) threshold. I hope the new detector does its job.