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.

This blog post shows the ease of set-up of the MFIA to measure capacitive transients for self-build DLTS. The combination of MFIA plus third-party temperature stage brings the possibility to tune your DLTS measurement parameters to suit your sample. Home-building your DLTS system with the MFIA gives you flexibility and the freedom to choose the test signal amplitude, frequency and even the mode of stressing pulse. 

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.