Zurich Instruments Blogs

Following my previous blog, Listening to FM Radio with the UHFLI 600 MHz Lock-in Amplifier and PLL, people advised me to also try and broadcast FM Radio. Naturally for this I had to retreat into Zurich Instruments’ shielded radiation lab, [...]

A guy at Zurich Instruments soldered a 3.5mm headphone socket to a BNC cable and attached a 75-cm antenna wire to the Signal Input of our 600MHz UHFLI Lock-in Amplifier with PLL option and was happily listening to FM radio. [...]

Kelvin Probe Force Microscopy (KPFM) is a scanning technique that allows the detection of a electrostatic potential distribution of a surface. The HF2PLL supports several variants of KPFM, some of them are mentioned in this post. Amplitude modulated KPFM (AM-KPFM) [...]

Very often people want to measure very large static impedance (e.g. small capacitance, large resistance) over a wide frequency range. In the very low frequency region, one may notice that measured curve is not smooth but rather “jiggly”, just like [...]

We often get questions from HF2LI lock-in amplifier customers who characterize MEMS and sometimes from those doing AFM scans on how to measure at half reference frequency using a lock-in amplifier. Half reference frequency lock-in measurement is often necessary when [...]

Ever wonder how you can read your measurement data in ziControl in the unit that you want and not just in voltage? Do you know how you can take the gain or loss introduced outside your HF2 device into consideration [...]

In the version of ziControl prior  to 12.08, our HF2IS Impedance Spectroscope customers could only observe the impedance measured through post-processing: one had to save the measurement X, Y data onto the PC, calculate the voltage and current quantity and [...]

This article describes how to simulate a band pass filter or resonator using the HF2LI lock-in amplifier. The digitally tunable parameters make it very versatile and e.g. allow to use it for benchmarking a phase locked loop. Hardware Requirements To [...]

Using a Zurich Instruments Lock-In amplifier, you are enabled to control the quality factor of an arbitrary resonator – typically a resonant beam used in non-contact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) applications. This can be useful e.g. to increase phase sensitivity [...]

Using a Zurich Instruments Lock-In amplifier, you are enabled to perform a multitude of AFM measurement modes. Particularly interesting is NC-AFM operation which makes use of the built-in PLL capability. Earlier, a user could easily crash his tip into a [...]

If you read this article, you’ve probably been asked by Zurich Instruments’ customer support to manually start a ziServer for testing purposes. Your input is highly appreciated and will help to improve our product. To circumvent confusion, please provide the [...]

Please use this calculator to get an idea of the time the demodulator filter needs to settle in order to achieve a specified accuracy given the filter order and time constant

This article is intended for users who are already familiar with the 2-channel 50 MHz HF2LI Lock-in Amplifier and want to extend it to four independent lock-in channels for measurements at frequencies up to 100 kHz. Please note that the [...]

In March 2011, Nanosurf and Zurich Instruments announced a cooperation to establish the HF2PLL as official upgrade path for Nanosurf’s EasyPLL. This post shows how to connect Nanosurf’s Manual Controller to the Zurich Instruments HF2PLL. The Manual Controller combined with [...]

This post is about the interplay between resolution, scanning speed and demodulation bandwidth. I demonstrate how the scanning process can be described in spatial, time and frequency domain, and show that this is a valuable toolbox to analyze your measurement setup as a whole.