SquidLab

A team at the Universities of Warwick, Nottingham and Cambridge have developed open-source software for analysing magnetic data and allowing more sensitive measurements

Summary by Dr Matt Coak

Measurements of magnetic properties in the lab are commonplace and essential across a range of physics, chemistry, materials science and even biology. There are many cases however where the magnetic signal of the sample holder or environment swamps that of the material to measure. Our new software, SquidLab, provides a powerful and flexible toolbox to remove magnetic backgrounds to recover the sample’s signal and allow measurements that were previously impossible.

The user-friendly programme is written and run in MATLAB and can be customised and integrated with the user’s own processing algorithms. After the user uploads a sample and a background dataset, SquidLab conducts multidimensional interpolation to ensure the data are at the same external conditions, such as magnetic field and temperature. It then performs the background subtraction and fits the data to the expected magnetic dipole form in a variety of customisable methods. The original use case was for high-pressure studies, but SquidLab is quickly proving an invaluable tool for a wide host of applications in magnetic measurement