Company Blog

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...

Digital modulation is extensively used in telecommunications, radar systems and quantum technologies. Corresponding to every analog modulation technique, i.e., amplitude modulation (AM), phase modulation (PM) and frequency modulation (FM), there is a digital version of signal modulation...

Multi-channel signal generation and detection are indispensable in many applications such as multi-qubit quantum computing and multi-sensor systems. Synchronization of signal channels comes to the equation when the temporal sequence of events is of interest, especially for fast physical phenomena with short lifetimes...

In this blog post, we investigate the relation between the noise of signal amplitude and phase on one hand, and the noise of in-phase and quadrature components of the signal on the other hand. We try to respond to the wrong intuition stating that the standard deviation of signal amplitude is higher than the standard deviation of each signal components...

The heart of a lock-in amplifier is a phase-sensitive detector that includes a signal mixer and a low-pass filter. In this blog post, we focus on the time response of the low-pass filters implemented in the Zurich Instruments lock-in amplifiers including the MFLI, the HF2LI and the UHFLI...

The Nyquist diagram of a transfer function is a parametric plot of its imaginary part versus real part as the frequency sweeps in a certain range. When dealing with electric circuits, the transfer function is the immittance of the circuit, i.e., it can be either the impedance or the admittance of the circuit...