A low-cost vibrating sample magnetometry based on audio components

Abstract

In this paper, we developed a low-cost, highly sensitive magnetization characterization instrument using a sound card and compared its sensitivity with commercially available measurement techniques. Firstly, we use an RLC circuit to measure the frequency-dependent response of the sound card and compare it with a lock-in amplifier. Then, we construct a simple but versatile measuring instrument, vibrating sample magnetometer (VSM) based on audio components, where data acquisition is performed by the sound card and the commercial lock-in amplifier. We test our magnetometry by measuring the magnetic hysteresis of three distinct samples: Nickel bulk piece, perm-alloy thin film with an easy-plane anisotropy, and Co/Pt multilayer with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. We also analyze the magnetizations of three samples for different vibration frequencies and compare the sensitivities of two data acquisition methods. Although the sound card performs slightly worse than the lock-in amplifier at the vibration frequencies lower than 20 Hz due to the frequency cut-off, the sound card provides approximately seven times better sensitivity than the lock-in amplifier does at higher frequencies up to 60 Hz. We found that the sound card based VSM can have a sensitivity as high as 2 micro-emu at 34.7 Hz vibration frequency, which can be suitable for various laboratory and industrial applications.