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European Frequency and Time Forum

Orientation light shift suppression in alkali atom microwave standards with laser pumping

Alexey Baranov, Ермак Сергей Викторович, V. V. Semenov

Published Apr 1, 2012• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

This work presents analytical studies of the orientation and light frequency shifts in microwave standards with regard to tensor component. It was shown that modulation technique application not only allows eliminating light shift but also provides significant reduction of the frequency errors introduced by external magnetic field orientation fluctuations while pumping alkali atoms with either D1 or D2 line.

DOI
10.1109/eftf.2012.6502336

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This work presents analytical studies of the orientation and light frequency shifts in microwave standards with regard to tensor component. It was shown that modulation technique application not only allows eliminating light shift but also provides significant reduction of the frequency errors introduced by external magnetic field orientation fluctuations while pumping alkali atoms with either D1 or D2 line.
The orientational frequency shift of the UHF radio-optical resonance in the 87 Rb vapor with a selective optical pumping by laser and lamp sources is studied experimentally and theoretically. A leading role of the tensor component of the light shift is noticed for both excitation modes, and a modulation technique of the resonance frequency orientation shift suppression is demonstrated. We show that it is necessary to ensure a constancy of the angle between the pump light direction and the external magnetic field vector when using a rubidium quantum discriminator based on moving and rotating carriers.
Alkali-metal-vapor magnetometers, using coherent precession of polarized atomic spins for magnetic field measurement, have become one of the most sensitive magnetic field detectors. Their application areas range from practical uses such as detections of NMR signals to fundamental physics research such as searches for permanent electric dipole moments. One of the main noise sources of atomic magnetometers comes from the light shift that depends on the frequency of the pump laser. In this work, we theoretically study the light shift, taking into account the relaxation due to the optical pumping and the collision between alkali atoms and between alkali atoms and the buffer gas. Starting from a full master equation containing both the ground and excited states, we adiabatically eliminate the excited states and obtain an effective master equation in the ground-state subspace that shows an intuitive picture and dramatically accelerates the numerical simulation. Solving this effective master equation, we find that in the light-narrowing regime, where the line width is reduced while the coherent precession signal is enhanced, the frequency-dependence of the light shift is largely reduced, which agrees with experimental observations in cesium magnetometers. Since this effective master equation is general and is easily solved, it can be applied to an extensive parameter regime, and also to study other physical problems in alkali-metal-vapor magnetometers, such as heading errors.
The contributions of the vector and scalar components to the magnetically dependent microwave transition frequency light shift are analyzed and the compensation of these components is experimentally demonstrated for the 87Rb atoms optically oriented by a laser tuned to the D 2 line of the head doublet. The Allan variance is studied as a function of the averaging time for a tandem of optically pumped quantum magnetometers (OPQMs), one of which is based on a low-frequency spin oscillator while another is based on a quantum microwave discriminator with a resonance frequency that corresponds to magnetically dependent transitions between HFS sublevels with the extremal value of the magnetic quantum number. It is shown that the compensation of the scalar and vector components of the light shift in OPQMs reduces the Allan variance at averaging times that exceed hundreds of seconds compared to a quantum discriminator based on the magnetically independent 0–0 transition. In this case, the minimal Allan variance in OPQMs at the end resonance is achieved at considerably longer averaging times than in the case of the quantum discriminator that is tuned to the 0–0 transition frequency.
We investigate a novel method to suppress the light-shift effect in laser-pumped passive rubidium frequency standards. The reduction of the light-shift due to additional frequency components in the pumping light is studied theoretically and compared to experimental results obtained with a frequency-modulated DBR laser diode as a pumping light source. In this way, a reduction of the light shift by a factor of 55 was successfully demonstrated. Complete cancellation of the light shift can be reached with a suitably adjusted modulation index and frequency.
The light shift is an important error source for atomic magnetometers. It would vanish if the frequency of the circularly polarized light is tuned to the optical resonance center. For high-density alkali-metal atomic magnetometers, the vapor cell has a large optical depth near the resonance, resulting in the difficulty in obtaining the exact resonance center by measuring the optical absorption line. In order to solve this problem, we propose a method to tune the pump light to a frequency where the shift is minimum based on the magnetic field zeroing technique. In addition, we also compare our results with the fitting center of the optical absorption line based on the measurement data far detuned from the resonance. The experimental results show that our method achieves a better suppression result of the light shift.