We present a portable optically pumped magnetometer instrument for ultra-sensitive measurements within the Earth's magnetic field. The central part of the system is a sensor head operating a MEMS-based Cs vapor cell in the light-shift dispersed Mz mode. It is connected to a compact, battery-driven electronics module by a flexible cable. We briefly review the working principles of the device and detail on the realization of both, sensor head and electronics. We show shielded and unshielded measurements within a static magnetic field amplitude of 50 uT demonstrating a noise level of the sensor system down to 140 fT/\sqrt{Hz} and a sensor bandwidth of several 100 Hz. In a detailed analysis of sensor noise we reveal the system to be limited by technical sources with straightforward strategies for further improvement towards its fundamental noise limit of 12 fT/\sqrt{Hz}. We assess the parameters defining the sensor bandwidth by theoretical modeling based on the Bloch equations. Finally, we compare our sensors' performance to a commercial SQUID system in a measurement environment typical for geomagnetic observatory practice and geomagnetic prospection.
Phase projection errors in rf-driven optically pumped magnetometers
Institute of Physics Belgrade, University of Belgrade（贝尔格莱德物理研究所，贝尔格莱德大学）；Physics Department, University of Fribourg（弗里堡大学物理系）；Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technology（莱布尼茨光子技术研究所）
Solid state battery technology is motivated by the desire to deliver flexible power storage in a safe and efficient manner. The increasingly widespread use of batteries from mass-production facilities highlights the need for a rapid and sensitive diagnostic for identifying battery defects. We demonstrate the use of atomic magnetometry to measure the magnetic fields around miniature solid-state battery cells. These fields encode information about battery manufacturing defects, state of charge, impurities, or can provide important insights into ageing processes. Compared with SQUID-based magneto…
We present theoretical description of Voigt and Faraday effect based optically pumped magnetometers using the Floquet expansion. Our analysis describes the spin-operator dynamics of the first, $\hat{F}(t)$, and second, $\hat{F}^2(t)$, order moments and takes into account of different pumping profiles and decoherence effects. We find that the theoretical results are in good agreement with the experimental demonstrations over a wide range of fields and pumping conditions. Finally, the theoretical analysis presented here is generalized and can be extended to different magnetometry schemes with ar…
We experimentally investigate the influence of the orientation of optically pumped magnetometers in Earth's magnetic field. We focus our analysis to an operational mode that promises femtotesla field resolu-tions at such field strengths. For this so-called light-shift dispersed Mz(LSD-Mz) regime, we focus on the key parameters defining its performance. That are the reconstructed Larmor frequency, the transfer function between output signal and magnetic field amplitude as well as the shot noise limited field resolution. We demonstrate that due to the use of two well balanced laser beams for opt…
The Bell-Bloom-type optically-pumped FID Rubidium atomic magnetometer with a multi-passing probe beam and two counter-propagating pump beams
State Key Laboratory of Quantum Optics Technologies and Devices, and Institute of Optoelectronics, Shanxi University（山西大学量子光学器件与量子光学技术国家重点实验室及光电研究所）；School of Physics and Electronic Engineering, Shanxi University（山西大学物理电子工程学院）；Collaborative Innovation Center of Extreme Optics, Shanxi University（山西大学极端光学协同创新中心）
An atomic magnetometer operated with elliptically polarized light is investigated theoretically and experimentally. To explore the potential of this magnetometric configuration, the analytical form of the outgoing signal is derived. Parameters that significantly influence the performance are optimized, which lead to a sensitivity of 300 $\rm fT/\sqrt{Hz}$ at 45 $^{\circ}$C with a 2$\times$2$\times2$ cm uncoated Rb vapor cell. It is remarkable that a sensitivity of 690 $\rm fT/\sqrt{Hz}$ is achieved at room temperature of 24 $^{\circ}$C, which is improved by an order of magnitude compared with …
When optically pumped magnetometers are aimed for the use in Earth's magnetic field, the orientation of the sensor to the field direction is of special importance to achieve accurate measurement result. 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 for example 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 Earth's magnetic field strengths, namely the non-li…
A free-induction-decay (FID) type optically-pumped rubidium atomic magnetometer driven by a radio-frequency (RF) magnetic field is presented in this paper. Influences of parameters, such as the temperature of rubidium vapor cell, the power of pump beam, and the strength of RF magnetic field and static magnetic field on the amplitude and the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the FID signal, have been investigated in the time domain and frequency domain. At the same time, the sensitivities of the magnetometer for the single-pass and the triple-pass probe beam cases have been compared by chang…
We study the effect of optical polarization squeezing on the performance of a sensitive, quantum-noise-limited optically pumped magnetometer. We use Bell-Bloom (BB) optical pumping to excite a $^{87}$Rb vapor containing $8.2 \cdot 10^{12} \mathrm{atoms/cm^3}$ and Faraday rotation to detect spin precession. The sub-$\mathrm{pT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ sensitivity is limited by spin projection noise (photon shot noise) at low (high) frequencies. Probe polarization squeezing both improves high-frequency sensitivity and increases measurement bandwidth, with no loss of sensitivity at any frequency, a d…
We present an apparatus to overcome the limitations of mechanical raster-scanning in electromagnetic induction imaging (EMI) techniques by instead performing a 2D optical raster-scan within the vapour cell of a radio-frequency atomic magnetometer (RF-AM). A large cuboidal 87Rb vapour cell is employed to act as the medium of an RF-AM with the pump and probe beams translated in the cell via acousto-optics. The technique is shown to give robust and repeatable magnetic measurements over the cell volume and successfully resolves conductive targets with EMI. Optical raster-scanning removes the limit…
本文报道了一种基于非线性磁光旋转效应的双通道磁强计。Cs原子被光学泵浦，并由调谐到D $_2$线的自由运行二极管激光器探测。泵浦激光器的宽频率调制用于产生同步塞曼光泵浦和超精细再泵浦。该磁力计工作在无屏蔽环境中，通过差分测量的方法消除了远距离磁源的杂散信号。在这种情况下，磁力计同时给出磁场模量和场差。共模噪声抑制允许灵敏度为\pthz{2}的高分辨率磁力测量。这种灵敏度与长期稳定性和大带宽相结合，使得可以在5 cm $^3$的测量体积中检测水质子磁化及其自由感应衰减
Optically pumped magnetometers usually rely on optical pumping using circularly- or linearly-polarized light. We study here zero-field magnetometers pumped with elliptically-polarized light, preparing both atomic orientation and alignment with complementary geometries. We start by extending the "three-step approach" for elliptically-polarized pumping. This allows us studying the Hanle effect in elliptical polarization by comparing the analytical absorption signals with experiments made on helium-4 metastable state. We then study parametric resonance magnetometers based on elliptical polarizati…
Sensitivity Scaling and Limits of Cavity Enhancement in Miniaturized Optically Pumped Magnetometers
ICFO - Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（光子科学研究所，巴塞罗那科技研究院）；ICREA - Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats（加泰罗尼亚高级研究学院）
An array of sixteen laser-pumped scalar Cs magnetometers was part of the neutron electric dipole moment (nEDM) experiment taking data at the Paul Scherrer Institute in 2015 and 2016. It was deployed to measure the gradients of the experiment's magnetic field and to monitor their temporal evolution. The originality of the array lies in its compact design, in which a single near-infrared diode laser drives all magnetometers that are located in a high-vacuum chamber, with a selection of the sensors mounted on a high-voltage electrode. We describe details of the Cs sensors' construction and modes …
We demonstrate the sensitivity of a sensor based on an optically-pumped radio-frequency (RF) atomic magnetometer to the polarization state of the detected RF magnetic field, and measure $>$36 dB difference in amplitude sensitivity for opposite circular field polarizations. This sensitivity could be used to create novel sensors that would allow signal detection while suppressing the ambient noise, regardless of the distance between the sources of signal and noise, in contrast to traditional gradiometry configurations. Additionally, such sensor will be orientation-sensitive, as the phase of the …
Inertial navigation systems generally consist of timing, acceleration, and orientation measurement units. Although much progress has been made towards developing primary timing sources such as atomic clocks, acceleration and orientation measurement units often require calibration. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) gyroscopes, which rely on continuous measurement of the simultaneous Larmor precession of two co-located polarized noble gases, can be configured to have scale factors that depend to first order only on fundamental constants. The noble gases are polarized by spin-exchange collisions w…
We demonstrate laser cooling and magneto-optical trapping of europium. The atoms are optically pumped to a metastable state and then loaded from an atomic-beam source via conventional Zeeman slowing and magneto-optical trapping techniques using a $J=13/2\leftrightarrow J=15/2$ quasi-cyclic transition. The trapped populations contained up to $1\times 10^7$ atoms, and a two-body loss rate is estimated as $1\times10^{-10}\,\mathrm{cm^3/s}$ from the non-exponential loss of atoms at high densities. We also observed leakage out of the quasi-cyclic transition to the two metastable states with $J=9/2$…
This article is designed as a step-by-step guide to optically pumped magnetometers based on alkali atomic vapor cells. We begin with a general introduction to atomic magneto-optical response, as well as expected magnetometer performance merits and how they are affected by main sources of noise. This is followed by a brief comparison of different magnetometer realizations and an overview of current research, with the aim of helping readers to identify the most suitable magnetometer type for specific applications. Next, we discuss some practical considerations for experimental implementations, u…
Double-resonance optically pumped magnetometers are an attractive instrument for unshielded magnetic field measurements due to their wide dynamic range and high sensitivity. Use of linearly polarised pump light creates alignment in the atomic sample, which evolves in the local static magnetic field, and is driven by a resonant applied field perturbation, modulating the polarisation of transmitted light. We show for the first time that the amplitude and phase of observed first- and second-harmonic components in the transmitted polarisation signal contain sufficient information to measure static…
A Low-Noise High-Density Alkali Metal Scalar Magnetometer
我们提出了一个标量原子磁力计的实验和理论研究，利用振荡场驱动的塞曼共振在高密度光泵钾蒸气。我们描述了一个原子梯度计的实验实现，其噪声水平低于10 fT/Hz^{1/2}，分数场灵敏度低于10^{-9}/Hz^{1/2}，有效测量体积约为1.5 cm ^3。我们表明，标量磁强计的基本场的灵敏度是由碱金属自旋交换碰撞的速率，即使共振线宽可以比自旋交换速率小得多，通过将大多数原子抽成一个拉伸的自旋状态。
We present a current monitoring system based on optical magnetometry, which is able to discriminate true current variations from environmental effects at room temperature. The system consists of a dedicated thermally stable magnetic field confining coil and an array of four optically pumped magnetometers arranged in a two-dimensional gradiometer configuration. These magnetometers monitor magnetic field variations inside the coil, which correlate to the variations of the driving current of the coil. The system uses a digital signal-processing unit to extract and record in real time the magnetic…
State-of-the-art magnetic field measurements performed in shielded environments with carefully controlled conditions rarely reflect the realities of those applications envisioned in the introductions of peer-reviewed publications. Nevertheless, significant advances in magnetometer sensitivity have been accompanied by serious attempts to bring these magnetometers into the challenging working environments in which they are often required. This review discusses the ways in which various (predominantly optically-pumped) magnetometer technologies have been adapted for use in a wide range of noisy a…
An Accurate Vector Magnetometer via Zeeman Rabi Oscillations
JILA, National Institute of Standards and Technology and University of Colorado（美国国家标准与技术研究院与科罗拉多大学JILA联合研究所）；Department of Physics, University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学物理系）；ICFO - Institut de Ciències Fotòniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（巴塞罗那科学技术研究所光子科学研究所）；Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado（科罗拉多大学保罗·M·雷迪机械工程系）；FieldLine Medical（FieldLine医疗公司）
