Lock In Amplifier

A lock in amplifier performs a multiplication of its input with a reference signal also sometimes called down mixing or heterodyne homodyne detection and then applies an adjustable low pass filter to the result.

Lock in amplifier. Lock in amplifiers use a technique known as phase sensitive detection to single out the component of the signal at a specific reference frequency and phase. Although unnecessary in constructing the circuit it is useful to recognise the. Each instrument is equipped with the control software labone. Noise signals at frequencies other than the reference frequency are rejected and do not affect the measurement.

The time constant is simply 1 2pf where f is the 3 db frequency of the filter. The largest interfering signal is defined as the amplitude of the largest signal at any frequency that can be applied to the input before the lock in cannot measure a signal with. A lock in amplifier is a type of amplifier that can extract a signal with a known carrier wave from an extremely noisy environment. If the frequency of the desired signal is known the instrument can lock in onto the signal using a matching reference frequency.

Lock in amplifiers zurich instruments provides lock in amplifiers for every frequency range up to 600 mhz. Lock in amplifiers use the knowledge about a signal s time dependence to extract it from a noisy background. Lock in amplifiers have traditionally set the low pass filter bandwidth by setting the time constant. Depending on the dynamic reserve of the instrument signals up to 1 million times smaller than noise components potentially fairly close by in frequency can still be reliably detected.

The amplifier achieves this by acting as a narrow bandpass filter that removes much of the unwanted noise while allowing through the signal that is to be measured. Lock in amplifiers are used frequently in scientific experiments that require measuring small voltages in noisy environments. Lock in amplifiers are used to measure the amplitude and phase of signals buried in noise by using the process of synchronous detection to recover the signals. The dynamic reserve of a lock in amplifier at a given full scale input voltage is the ratio in db of the largest interfering signal to the full scale input voltage.

Lock in amplifiers recover signals in noisy backgrounds or give high resolution measurements of clean signals over several orders of magnitude and frequency.