Digital Lock-In Detection for Discriminating Multiple Modulation Frequencies With High Accuracy and Computational Efficiency

Abstract

We introduce a novel digital lock-in detection technique for simultaneously measuring the amplitude and phase of multiple amplitude-modulated signals. Using particular modulation and sampling constraints and averaging filters, we achieve optimal noise reduction and discrimination between sources of different modulation frequencies. Furthermore, it is shown that the digital lock-in technique can be performed as a simple matrix multiplication, which considerably reduces the computation time. The digital lock-in algorithm is described and analyzed under certain sampling and modulation conditions, and results are shown for both numerical and experimental data.