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Tenth International Conference on Information Optics and Photonics

Suppression of mechanical error in micro-rotation-angle measurement of optical pumped atomic magnetometers

Huiyu Li, Kaibin Cui, Yu Wang, Guangwei Chen

Published Nov 24, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

The measurement of ultra-weak magnetic fields relies on the conversion of magnetic field information to atom spins using alkali metals. In this context, the detection of magnetic fields is accomplished through rotation angle measurement of linearly polarized light. This paper proposes a novel method to suppress mechanical errors between polarizers in the rotation angle measurement, taking advantage of the optical setup characteristics in atomic magnetometers. The method involves applying two separate frequency modulations to the pump beam and probe beam, effectively eliminating mechanical errors between the polarizers as a direct current component using a double-channel lock-in amplifier. Additionally, the double modulation method offers a solution to suppress shot noise caused by incident beam fluctuations or transverse spin relaxation, as well as mechanical errors among optical elements in the light path, enabling high-precision measurements.

DOI
10.1117/12.3005437

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Atomic magnetometers use the coherent precession of polarized atomic spins to detect and measure magnetic fields. When an off-resonant, linearly polarized probe beam propagates through the atomic vapor cell, the precession will cause a rotation of its polarization plane. Measuring the angle of the rotation, the magnetic field can be calculated. In this paper, we introduce the basic principles of atomic magnetometers and describe the method to measure the angle. Then a dual-phase lock-in amplifier (LIA) is proposed to detect the weak signal of the atomic magnetometer. And we design a simulation for the LIA based on Matlab/Simulink. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the detecting system is well working and it is possible to detect weak signal of magnetic fields in an accurate way.
The alkali-atom density measurement method based on light absorption is highly suitable for a spin-exchange relaxationfree (SERF) atomic magnetometer because of its high-precision measurement and complete nonmagnetic interference.In this study, the optical rotation angle detection system based on polarization balance detection is utilized to realize the alkali-atom density real-time measurement without affecting magnetic field measurement.We discovered that there exists an optimal frequency detuning of the probe light, which offers the highest sensitivity in alkali-atom density measurement and the lowest susceptibility to temperature fluctuations in terms of the scale factor.In contrast to conventional light absorption measurements based on pump light, this method demonstrated a threefold improvement in alkali-atom density measurement sensitivity while remaining immune to ambient magnetic fields and incident light intensity fluctuations.Furthermore, we utilized this method to achieve closed-loop temperature control with an accuracy of 0.04°C.
High-precision Mz/Mx atomic magnetometers have “dead zones”, where the magnetic-field information will be lost because the light–atom interaction vanishes at specific field angles. To suppress dead zones, we propose a scheme with polarization-gradient optical pumping field by using counter-propagating lin⊥lin beams. We found through experiments that the lin⊥lin scheme eliminates dead zones in the transverse plane of the probe beam propagation (minimum ∼40% normalized signal) but leaves two noncanonical magic-angle-like directions (≈30 ∘ and 150 ∘ ) in the longitudinal plane, which is distinct from the standard tensor magic angle (≈54 ∘ and 126 ∘ ). These observations are quantitatively explained using a multipole-based model formulated in terms of an effective, spatially averaged density matrix, which is the first time that the spatial average density matrix has been used for energy state analysis in atomic magnetometers. Under the probing of a linearly polarized light, the measured signal is determined by the field-angle-dependent projection of the atomic longitudinal alignment moment ( m 2,0 ) onto the B 0 -defined quantization axis. Compared with other dead-zone elimination schemes, our scheme avoids polarization modulation and multi-cell architectures, showing potential for improving the spatial response range of compact atomic magnetometry.
Ultrasensitive atomic comagnetometers (ACMs) are invaluable tools for both inertial measurement and fundamental physics research. However, the misalignment between the pump light and the main magnetic field affects the polarization characteristics of nuclear spins of the noble gas atoms, making it a significant source of noise. In this article, an atomic magnetometer response model with the optical-magnetic misalignment error is established, and the mechanism of the influence of optical-magnetic misalignment on nuclear spin polarization is analyzed. An in situ evaluation method and a suppression method of optical-magnetic misalignment error are proposed, and their effectiveness is verified through experiments with varying pump light incidence directions. The experimental results indicate that after optical-magnetic alignment using the proposed method, the spin polarization of the coupled atomic ensemble is enhanced by 20.7%, and the longitudinal relaxation rate of the nuclear spin is reduced by 6.9%. Additionally, the amplitude-frequency response (AFR) of the x-axis magnetic field is reduced by 33.2% at 1 Hz and by 53.1% at frequencies below 0.002 Hz. This indicates an improvement in the transverse magnetic field error suppression capability of the ACMs.
Phase error is one of the primary factors leading to deviations between the readings of alkali-metal optically pumped atomic magnetometers (OPAMs) operating in closed-loop mode and the true magnetic field values. Because the phase error varies significantly with both the magnitude of the measured magnetic field and the orientation of the probe relative to the field direction, it imposes a major limitation on the use of OPAMs in real geomagnetic environments. To address this issue, a rapid suppression method for phase error in closed-loop OPAM operation is proposed. Specifically, the azimuth, pitch, and rotation angles are employed to quantitatively characterize the spatial orientation of the measured magnetic field with respect to the probe, and the phase error is measured and calibrated under closed-loop conditions. Experimental results indicate that the phase error mainly arises from changes in the rotation angle and the magnitude of the magnetic field, and is essentially insensitive to variations in azimuth and pitch angles. Based on this calibration, the effectiveness of the proposed suppression method was verified. When the instantaneous fluctuation of the phase error is less than π /6, the method can suppress the phase error to within π /180 within one second, with negligible impact on the OPAM’s dynamic performance. This work provides a dynamic phase error suppression approach for OPAMs, refines the theoretical understanding of OPAM phase errors, and lays a solid foundation for their design and application in geomagnetic environments.