Company Blog

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.

Real-time feedback control can often speed up quantum experiments, increase fidelity, or enable new methods. One example is adaptive sensing and characterization, which uses feedback to minimize the number of measurements needed to estimate a given quantity. Our customers in the group of Prof. Cristian Bonato at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, Scotland) have recently demonstrated this method on an NV-center based spin qubit and achieved an increase in speed by up to an order of magnitude compared to non-adaptive approaches in the estimation of qubit decoherence timescales.

This blog post takes a look at impedance measurements in the presence of a high parasitic resistance, and shows that you can accurately measure small impedance DUTs even in the presence of a high in-series resistance such as with an unavoidable resistance in the measurement fixture, cables or sample stage. We show that thanks to the high dynamic reserve of the MFIA (and MFLI with MF-IA option), coupled with the user compensation feature, accurate impedance measurements can be taken even in the presence of a high in-series resistance such as 1 MΩ.

Drive level capacitance profiling (DLCP) is a powerful technique to accurately determine the charge carrier density in semiconductors when deep level states are present. It is often considered an improvement over the widely applied characterization technique known as capacitance-voltage (C-V) profiling...

The MFIA is a high-precision impedance analyzer that can run measurements in either 2-terminal or 4-terminal mode. What is the right setting for your measurement? This blog post addresses this question and explains how to use the MFIA to its full capability...

In electrochemistry, the characteristics of a given process can be assessed by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). A semicircle in the Nyquist plot usually corresponds to electrochemical processes that can be modelled as a parallel connection of a resistor (R) and a capacitor (C). The diameter of the semicircle provides the value of R, while the associated time constant (also known as relaxation time) is given by RC...

The MFIA is a high-precision impedance analyzer. It measures voltage, current and phase to calculate impedance. As is the case for most impedance analyzers, the measurement circuit is designed so that the device under test (DUT) is operated under floating conditions, which means that none of the terminals of the DUT is connected to the ground...