We present the design and implementation of a measurement system that enables parallel drive and detection of small currents and voltages at numerous electrical contacts to a multi-terminal electrical device. This system, which we term a feedback lock-in, combines digital control-loop feedback with software-defined lock-in measurements to dynamically source currents and measure small, pre-amplified potentials. The effective input impedance of each current/voltage probe can be set via software, permitting any given contact to behave as an open-circuit voltage lead or as a virtually grounded current source/sink. This enables programmatic switching of measurement configurations and permits measurement of currents at multiple drain contacts without the use of current preamplifiers. Our 32-channel implementation relies on commercially available digital input/output boards, home-built voltage preamplifiers, and custom open-source software. With our feedback lock-in, we demonstrate differential measurement sensitivity comparable to a widely used commercially available lock-in amplifier and perform efficient multi-terminal electrical transport measurements on twisted bilayer graphene and SrTiO3 quantum point contacts. The feedback lock-in also enables a new style of measurement using multiple current probes, which we demonstrate on a ballistic graphene device.
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January 2023
Research Article|
January 04 2023
Feedback lock-in: A versatile multi-terminal measurement system for electrical transport devices
Arthur W. Barnard
;
Arthur W. Barnard
a)
(Conceptualization, Software, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
1
Department of Physics, Stanford University
, Stanford, California 94305, USA
2
Department of Physics, University of Washington
, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA
3
Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of Washington
, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA
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Evgeny Mikheev
;
Evgeny Mikheev
(Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
1
Department of Physics, Stanford University
, Stanford, California 94305, USA
4
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA
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Joe Finney
;
Joe Finney
(Methodology, Software, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
1
Department of Physics, Stanford University
, Stanford, California 94305, USA
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Han S. Hiller
;
Han S. Hiller
(Investigation, Software, Writing – review & editing)
2
Department of Physics, University of Washington
, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA
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David Goldhaber-Gordon
David Goldhaber-Gordon
a)
(Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing)
1
Department of Physics, Stanford University
, Stanford, California 94305, USA
4
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA
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Rev. Sci. Instrum. 94, 013902 (2023)
Article history
Received:
February 23 2022
Accepted:
December 15 2022
Citation
Arthur W. Barnard, Evgeny Mikheev, Joe Finney, Han S. Hiller, David Goldhaber-Gordon; Feedback lock-in: A versatile multi-terminal measurement system for electrical transport devices. Rev. Sci. Instrum. 1 January 2023; 94 (1): 013902. https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0089194
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