The Lock-in amplifier tutorial [1] will help students understand basic and some advanced concepts related to the principle of operation and use of a lock-in amplifier (LIA). It is intended for use by students who are beginning their research in a physics or electrical engineering laboratory setting but can be used also by advanced graduate students or anyone wishing to develop a deeper understanding of how LIAs work and are used.
This tutorial is research-based and explicitly addresses common difficulties that graduate students have with LIAs in their experimental research. The tutorial also comes bundled with a computer-simulated lock-in amplifier that is used with the tutorial but can also be used independently to explore the properties of LIAs. It also helps students develop an intuitive feel for many of the possible situations that they may encounter in their experiments.
The latest installer file can be found here.
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Education materials are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the published article's author(s), title, proceedings citation, and DOI.
The software is released under the MIT license. Distribution must retain the copyright and attribution.
- Seth DeVore, Alexandre Gauthier, Jeremy Levy, and Chandralekha Singh, Improving Students' Understanding of Lock-In Amplifiers, Physics Education Research Conference 2013, Part of the PER Conference series, Portland, OR: July 17-18, 2013, Pages 121-124