Overview

mesoscoPy is a high-level interface for transport measurements, based on QCoDeS. It enables you to control equipments to perform electron transport measurements in a quick and easy way.

It was designed with the Manchester’s National Graphene Institute’s setup in mind, but can easily be adapted to a variety of different cryostats and measurement equipments.

The experiments are usually composed of DC voltage and current sources, lock-in amplifiers and cryostats/dilution refrigerators, equipped with superconduciting magnets. mesoscoPy allows to control multiple equipments simultaneously to acquire and process data.

At the moment, mesoscoPy allows the use of the following equipments:

  • Lock-in amplifiers: Zurich Instruments MFLI, SRS 830

  • DC source-measurement units: Keithley 2400 and 2600 series

  • cryostats & superconducting magnets: Oxford Instruments Triton (temperature + magnet), Oxford Instruments Mercury iPS (magnet), Oxford Instruments IPS120 (magnet), Oxford Instruments Mercury iTC (temperature), Oxford Instruments ITC503 (temperature)

  • Signal generator: R&S SMB 100A (rf), SRS CS580 (ac+dc current source)

A number of other instruments can be added, thanks to the use of QCoDeS as a low level background interface.

mesoscoPy offers a unified model for viewing and handling measurement sweeps. It saves all the data in SQL databases, that can be easily accessed. In addition, the data can be easily plotted with publication quality.

Example

The following code shows an example of python code to measure 2 lock-ins while sweeping a voltage source gate using mesoscoPy’s high level programming construct.

import mesoscopy
station = mesoscopy.init_station(
    '4400', '4401',
    SMU_addr='TCPIP::192.168.0.2::inst0::INSTR'
)

mesoscopy.init_lockin(station, freq=127, ampl=2)

xvals = mesoscopy.generate_lin_array(10, -10, step=.1)

mesoscopy.measurement.sweep1d(
     station.keithley.smua.volt,
     xvals,
     1.6,
     station.mf4400.demods[0].sample,
     station.mf4401.demods[0].sample,
 )

mesoscoPy Releases

mesoscoPy is still a software in development. It was mostly designed with one experimental setup in mind, therefore may not be exactly suited for your experiment. If you have any feature request, please do it on github.