Company Blog

Chiral 1D edge states of the quantum anomalous Hall effect can be used as “optical fibers” for electrons. To gain a deeper understanding of their properties, the dispersion relation and the attenuation of edge excitations in the microwave regime can be investigated. In this blog post, we present measurements that were performed in the lab of Prof. Bocquillon using our SHFLI 8.5 GHz Lock-in Amplifier.

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.

Resonators with very high Q factor are notoriously complicated to lock because of the steep slope phase at resonance. Precise determination of phase setpoint and gains can be highly time consuming since very high frequency resolution is required. This blog explains how to optimize the PLL by starting with an educated guess and optimizing everything in closed-loop, which is much faster than conventional open-loop characterizations.

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.

This blog post accompanies the online launch event of the GHFLI and SHFLI Lock-in Amplifiers, the trailblazers that bring state-of-the-art signal generation, analysis, and control to microwaves. Watch the recording and read the transcript of the Q&A to learn about the innovations brought by these new instruments and how they can help researchers and engineers.

Lock-in amplifiers are extremely versatile and used in a plethora of applications ranging from optics and photonics, nanotechnology, spm, and sensing, among others. In this blog, you will learn how to use the MFLI Lock-in Amplifier to carefully assess the experimental conditions and prepare your setup for the best measurement outcome.