Company Blog

This blog post provides the answers to the questions asked by the audience during the webinar "Lock-in Amplifier or Boxcar Averager? Choosing the Right Measurement Tool for Periodic Signals”, and points to other helpful resources.

Do you want to use a Raspberry Pi to control your Zurich Instruments devices? Although instruments are traditionnaly hooked up to a measurement computer, some applications might require a computer with a smaller footprint or lower power requirement. This blog post will walk you through the necessary steps and help get you started.

In this tutorial, we learned how to use lock-in amplifiers and optimize measurement parameters to get the best signal-to-noise ratio. We discussed three common use cases: optics and photonics experiments, material characterization, and resonator characterization. Finally, we looked at more advanced techniques, such as double modulation and multi-frequency measurements.

Any measurement resolution is limited by random fluctuations, "noise", of the measured quantities. Practical systems also might experience variations of parameters causing "drifts" in the measurements. Various sources of such noises and drifts may take different time or frequency dependencies. To understand how such fluctuations affect one's measurement, a careful analysis of such noise and drifts must be performed. Discrimination of such noise sources might be performed by performing Allan deviation measurement of discretely sample data. In this blog post, we discuss how to easily measure Allan variance with our Zurich Instruments lock-in amplifier.

Today, lock-in amplifiers are widespread instruments used to measure small signals buried in noise. Thanks to their versatility, they can be tailored to different experiments and address a large variety of applications...

Timing is extremely important to correlate the results from different experimental signals. In this blog post we will show how to work with timestamps from a Zurich Instruments lock-in amplifier when measuring multiple signals simultaneously.

In this webinar, we covered the material properties that are most important to consider when developing qubits with longer coherence times and looked into how to characterize these materials accurately and efficiently. By focusing on the fundamental properties of the materials, simpler fabrication methods and experimental setups can be used...

Spectral characterization of signals and systems is required in a broad range of applications in physics and engineering. Analyzing a signal in the frequency domain reveals valuable information about the signal behavior which is not necessarily obtainable from its time-domain analysis...

Proper noise characterization is essential in many applications, especially when dealing with tiny signals buried in noise like in nanotechnology, photonics and quantum physics. Noise characteristics of a system are often represented by the noise spectral density in amplitude or power mode, the latter being called power spectral density (PSD), within the frequency range of interest...

Phase-locked loops (PLLs) are widely used to recover the frequency of a carrier signal in many detection systems such as lock-in amplifiers and data receivers. To properly lock to the carrier phase and extract its frequency, a clean reference separate from the signal or a pilot tone within the signal must be provided for the PLL...