Experimental sampling distributions of the Allan variance in DC electrical measurements

Stochastic serial correlations in DC measurements can be characterized using the Allan variance. Indeed, the Allan variance can be used to characterize the stability of instruments themselves. For such applications it is useful to be able to specify its uncertainty. By repeating sets of 2048 observations more than 500 times in succession, the experimental sampling distribution of the Allan variance was obtained and found to agree well with the chi-square distribution calculated from the number of degrees of freedom estimated from the data.