Thermal noise measurement 2026-10-18
MIT's laboratory guide mounts resistors on an aluminum box beneath a metal beaker shield, with short twisted leads. Its SR560 amplifier uses nominal gain before a Krohn-Hite – band-pass filter; an oscilloscope reads root mean square voltage. Calibration sweeps an attenuated sinusoid and measures the actual gain . Students alternate the resistor and a short circuit, subtracting squared readings , and disconnect the ohmmeter during noise acquisition. Lead and input capacitance enter the gain-squared integral. With settings unchanged, varying electrical resistance or temperature tests the predicted mean square. The guide prescribes repeated readings and warns against averaging noise waveforms to zero. This is a documented teaching protocol, not a supplied dataset of measured outcomes.[ref]
The subtraction requires care: shorting the input changes the source electrical impedance. An amplifier's input current noise can therefore produce different voltage noise in the two configurations; a shorted baseline alone does not remove that contribution. Gain drift, interference and insufficient observation time also limit the inference. These are limitations of interpreting the measurement, not corrections that can be inferred from the nominal signal bandwidth alone. In an independent analysis one would compare the measured difference with
where represents the measured shunt capacitance and excludes that separately modeled shunt. If calibration already includes the same shunt response, applying the denominator again counts the attenuation twice. The thermal noise worked example and both original figures illustrate ideal models; they claim no measured agreement or measured value of the Boltzmann constant.