Effects on DC SQUID characteristics of damping of input coil resonances

The possibility of improving dc SQUID performance by damping the input circuit resonances caused by parasitic capacitances is studied experimentally. A high-quality dc SQUID was coupled to a first-order axial gradiometer built for neuromagnetic research, and a resistor-capacitor shunt was connected in parallel with the input coil of the SQUID. Ten different RC shunts were studied with the SQUID operating in a flux-locked loop, carefully shielded against external disturbances. It was found that increasing the shunt resistance resulted in smoother flux-voltage characteristics and smaller noise. At best, the minimum obtainable equivalent flux noise level was one-fourth that for the unshunted SQUID. The noise level is a function of the shunt resistance Rsonly, except for shunt capacitance values bringing the low-frequency resonance of the input coil close to the flux modulation frequency. At a constant bias current level, where the amplitude of the flux-voltage characteristics is at maximum, the equivalent flux noise varies as Rs/-0.7. The results agree reasonably well with recently published predictions based on numerical simulations where the whole input circuit with parasitic capacitances was taken into account. © 1987 Plenum Publishing Corporation.