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Frontiers in Optics

Production and detection of atomic hexadecapole at Earth’s magnetic field

Víctor M. Acosta, Marcis P. Auzinsh, Wojciech Gawlik, П В Гришин, Derek F. Jackson Kimball, Leszek Krzemień, M. P. Ledbetter, Szymon Pustelny, Simon Rochester, Valeriy V. Yashchuk, Dmitry Budker

Published Jan 1, 2007• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Optical magnetometers measure magnetic fields with extremely high precision and without cryogenics. However, at geomagnetic fields, important for applications from landmine removal to archaeology, they suffer from nonlinear Zeeman splitting, leading to systematic dependence on sensor orientation. We present experimental results on a method of eliminating this systematic error, using the hexadecapole atomic polarization moment. In particular, we demonstrate selective production of the atomic hexadecapole moment at Earth’s magnetic field and verify its immunity to nonlinear Zeeman splitting. This technique promises to eliminate directional errors in all-optical atomic magnetometers, potentially improving their measurement accuracy by several orders of magnitude.

DOI
10.1364/fio.2007.pdp_a4

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Production and detection of atomic hexadecapole at Earth’s magnetic field

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Optical magnetometers measure magnetic fields with extremely high precision and without cryogenics. However, at geomagnetic fields, important for applications from landmine removal to archaeology, they suffer from nonlinear Zeeman splitting, leading to systematic dependence on sensor orientation. We present experimental results on a method of eliminating this systematic error, using the hexadecapole atomic polarization moment. In particular, we demonstrate selective production of the atomic hexadecapole moment at Earth's magnetic field and verify its immunity to nonlinear Zeeman splitting. This technique promises to eliminate directional errors in all-optical atomic magnetometers, potentially improving their measurement accuracy by several orders of magnitude.

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Optical magnetometers measure magnetic fields with extremely high precision and without cryogenics. However, at geomagnetic fields, important for applications from landmine removal to archaeology, they suffer from nonlinear Zeeman splitting, leading to systematic dependence on sensor orientation. We present experimental results on a method of eliminating this systematic error, using the hexadecapole atomic polarization moment. In particular, we demonstrate selective production of the atomic hexadecapole moment at Earth’s magnetic field and verify its immunity to nonlinear Zeeman splitting. This technique promises to eliminate directional errors in all-optical atomic magnetometers, potentially improving their measurement accuracy by several orders of magnitude.
Optical magnetometers measure magnetic fields with extremely high precision and without cryogenics. However, at geomagnetic fields, important for applications from landmine removal to archaeology, they suffer from nonlinear Zeeman splitting, leading to systematic dependence on sensor orientation. We present experimental results on a method of eliminating this systematic error, using the hexadecapole atomic polarization moment. In particular, we demonstrate selective production of the atomic hexadecapole moment at Earth's magnetic field and verify its immunity to nonlinear Zeeman splitting. This technique promises to eliminate directional errors in all-optical atomic magnetometers, potentially improving their measurement accuracy by several orders of magnitude.
When optically pumped magnetometers are aimed for use in the Earth's magnetic field, the orientation of the sensor to the field direction is of special importance to achieve accurate measurement results. Measurement errors and inaccuracies related to the heading of the sensor can be an even more severe problem in the case of special operational configurations, such as the use of strong off-resonant pumping. We systematically study the main contributions to the heading error in systems that promise high magnetic field resolutions at the Earth's magnetic field strengths, namely the nonlinear Zeeman splitting and the orientation-dependent light shift. The good correspondence of our theoretical analysis to experimental data demonstrates that both of these effects are related to a heading-dependent modification of the interaction between the laser light and the dipole moment of the atoms. Also, our results promise a compensation of both effects using a combination of clockwise and counterclockwise circular polarization.
We demonstrate an alignment-based 87Rb^{87}\mathrm{Rb}87Rb magnetometer that is immune to nonlinear Zeeman (NLZ) splitting, addressing an important problem in alkali-metal atomic magnetometry. In our scheme, there is a single magnetic resonance peak and well-separated hyperfine transition frequencies, making the magnetometer insensitive or even immune to NLZ-related heading errors. It is shown that the magnetometer can be implemented for practical measurements in geomagnetic environments, and the photon-shot-noise-limited sensitivity reaches 9  fT/Hz9\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{fT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}9  fT/Hz​ at $5\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{\ensuremath{\mu}}\mathrm{T}$ and remains at tens of fT/Hz\mathrm{fT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}fT/Hz​ at $50\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{\ensuremath{\mu}}\mathrm{T}$ at room temperature.
The nonlinear Zeeman effect can induce splitting and asymmetries of magnetic-resonance lines in the geophysical magnetic-field range. This is a major source of "heading error" for scalar atomic magnetometers. We demonstrate a method to suppress the nonlinear Zeeman effect and heading error based on spin locking. In an all-optical synchronously pumped magnetometer with separate pump and probe beams, we apply a radio-frequency field which is in phase with the precessing magnetization. This results in the collapse of the multicomponent asymmetric magnetic-resonance line with ∼100 Hz width in the Earth-field range into a single peak with a width of 22 Hz, whose position is largely independent of the orientation of the sensor within a range of orientation angles. The technique is expected to be broadly applicable in practical magnetometry, potentially boosting the sensitivity and accuracy of Earth-surveying magnetometers by increasing the magnetic-resonance amplitude, decreasing its width, and removing the important and limiting heading-error systematic.
Abstract Polarization moments play a crucial role in measuring magnetic fields for nonlinear magneto‐optical rotation (NMOR) atomic magnetometers. However, it is challenging to distinguish between each polarization moment and evaluate its effect on the magnetic resonance response signal in an alkali vapor cell with buffer gas. To address this issue, a method is proposed to identify different polarization moments through the frequency shift of the magnetic resonance response signal. The proportion of each polarization moment is determined, and it is demonstrated that the magnetic resonance response signal is affected by the hexadecapole moment, resulting in a frequency shift and a decrease in signal amplitude. To mitigate this effect, an approach is investigated to manipulate the polarization moments by flipping the phase of the pump light. Ultimately, a 15.19% increase in response amplitude is achieved in the simulated geomagnetic environment within the magnetic shield barrel. The theory and method presented here provide strong support for the study of the polarization moments in an alkali vapor cell with buffer gas, which potentially enhance the performance of NMOR atomic magnetometers.
Atomic magnetometers have very high absolute precision and sensitivity to magnetic fields but suffer from a fundamental problem: the vectorial or tensorial interaction of light with atoms leads to "dead zones," certain orientations of the magnetic field where the magnetometer loses its sensitivity. We demonstrate a simple polarization modulation scheme that simultaneously creates coherent population trapping (CPT) in orientation and alignment, thereby eliminating dead zones. Using 87Rb in a 10 Torr buffer gas cell we measure narrow, high-contrast CPT transparency peaks for all orientations and also show the absence of systematic effects associated with nonlinear Zeeman splitting.