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Academic Symposium on Optoelectronics and Microelectronics Technology and Chinese-Russian Symposium on Laser Physics and Laser TechnologyOptoelectronics Technology

A picotesla atomic magnetometer operating at normal temperature

Qiang Liu, Zhang Junhai, Zeng Xianjin, Simiao Han, Jiuxing Li, Qingmeng Li, Huang Qiang, Huang Zongjun, Sun Weimin

Published Oct 1, 2011• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The basic principle of atomic magnetometer is to measure the precession frequency of polarized atomic spins in a magnetic field. The paper describes the optical pump, probe process and spin relaxation mechanisms. The magnetometer based on Cs atom is demonstrated in the experiment. At normal temperature 30°C the magnetometer achieves 8nT magnetic resonance widths and magnetic field sensitivity of 4.8pT/Hz1/2. It is more convenient for miniature structure design due to operate in lower temperature.

DOI
10.1109/aismot.2011.6159341

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The basic principle of atomic magnetometer is to measure the precession frequency of polarized atomic spins in a magnetic field. The paper describes the optical pump, probe process and spin relaxation mechanisms. The magnetometer based on Cs atom is demonstrated in the experiment. At normal temperature 30°C the magnetometer achieves 8nT magnetic resonance widths and magnetic field sensitivity of 4.8pT/Hz1/2. It is more convenient for miniature structure design due to operate in lower temperature.
Alkali atomic magnetometer is a good choice for magnetic testing devices with very-high sensitivity. Many parameters could affect the sensitivity of the atomic magnetometer. In this paper we described a Cs atomic magnetometer operating at normal temperature. A circularly polarized pumping light is used to polarize Cs atoms, while a linear polarized probing light is used to test the magneto-caused polarization rotation. During the experiment, we found the temperature is a very important parameter for the signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) enhancement. On the one hand, the higher temperature makes the SNR higher, which is good for sensitivity. On the other hand, the higher temperature causes more frequent collisions between the Cs atoms and the Cs atom and container wall, so that the polarization is easy to be broken, which reduces its sensitivity. So there must be a proper temperature for the high-sensitivity atomic magnetometer. We measured the magnetometer linewidth and sensitivity in the experiment. At optimum temperature the magnetometer achieves magnetic field sensitivity of 3.2pT/Hz1/2.
We demonstrate a three-axis atomic magnetometer with one intensity-modulated pump beam and one orthogonal probe beam. The main field component is measured using the resonance of the pumping light, while the transverse field components are measured simultaneously using the optical rotation of the probe beam modulated by the spin precession. It is an all-optical magnetometer without using any modulation field or radio frequency field. Magnetic field sensitivity of 0.8 pT/Hz1∕2 is achieved under a bias field of 2 μT.
In order to availably solve the crosstalk of the traditionally optically pumped magnetometer,in which an oscillating magnetic field drives transitions between Zeeman magnetic sublevels,an all-optical cesium(Cs)atomic magnetometer based on Bell-Bloom structure has been investigated and demonstrated experimentally in this paper.When there is an external magnetic field,by analyzing the Larmor precession spectrum of the polarized ground state atoms induced by a modulated pump laser,the atomic magnetometer with high sensitivity is achieved.First,we present the operating principle of the magnetometer with amplitude modulation and set up the experimental system by means of a three-layer magnetic shield.Then in the case of 100 nT field by optimizing the experimental parameters,i.e.,the frequency and intensity of the pump laser,we have obtained the atomic precession spectrum with line width(full width at half maximum)of 22 Hz and signal noise ratio(SNR)of 3.2×104 per unit hertz band width,and then have evaluated the magnetometer with an intrinsic sensitivity of 100fT/Hz1/2 and spatial resolution smaller than 1.2cm,while the experimentally closed loop test shows that the cesium atomic magnetometer would have the sensitivity of 120fT/Hz1/2 and response time of 300 ms.
A high-sensitivity optically pumped atomic magnetometer working in the geomagnetic range utilizing the light-narrowing effect and in-phase excitation is described. The setup is based on a simple pump–probe arrangement built around a Cs vapor cell whose active volume is 64 mm3. The transverse oscillating field is applied parallel to the probe beam to drive Zeeman resonance, and the in-phase component of the resonance signal is measured to determine the field. The sensitivity of the magnetometer is improved by pumping most atoms into the stretched state. Consequently, spin-exchange relaxation is suppressed, and a sensitivity of 0.1 pT/Hz1/2 in the range of 10 μT is achieved. This magnetometer has the advantages of large dynamic range, high performance of low-frequency stabilization, high response speed, and compact size. It can be used for many cutting-edge applications such as detection of magnetic anomalies.
We demonstrated a scalar atomic magnetometer using a microfabricated Cs vapor cell. The atomic spin precession is driven by an amplitude-modulated circularly-polarized pump laser resonant on the D1 transition of Cs atoms and detected by an off-resonant linearly-polarized probe laser using a balanced polarimeter setup. Under a magnetic field with amplitude in the Earth's magnetic field range, the magnetometer in the gradiometer mode can reach sensitivities below 150fT/Hz, which shows that the magnetometer by itself can achieve sub-100fT/Hz sensitivities. In addition to its high sensitivity, the magnetometer has a bandwidth close to 1 kHz due to the broad magnetic resonance inside the small vapor cell. Our experiment suggests the feasibility of a portable low-power and high-performance magnetometer which can be operated in the Earth's magnetic field. Such a device will greatly reduce the restrictions on the operating environment and expand the range of applications for atomic magnetometers, such as detection of nuclear magnetic resonance in low magnetic fields.
We describe an ultrasensitive atomic magnetometer based on optically pumped potassium atoms operating in a spin-exchange relaxation free regime. We demonstrate magnetic field sensitivity of 160 aT/Hz1/2 in a gradiometer arrangement with a measurement volume of 0.45 cm3 and energy resolution per unit bandwidth of 44ℏ. As an example of an application enabled by such a magnetometer, we describe measurements of weak remnant rock magnetization as a function of temperature with a sensitivity on the order of 10−10 emu/cm3/Hz1/2 and temperatures up to 420°C.