Ultrasensitive magnetic field detection using a single artificial atom
arXiv:1301.0778 · doi:10.1038/ncomms2332
Abstract
Efficient detection of magnetic fields is central to many areas of research and has important practical applications ranging from materials science to geomagnetism. High sensitivity detectors are commonly built using direct current-superconducting quantum interference devices (DC-SQUIDs) or atomic systems. Here we use a single artificial atom to implement an ultrahigh sensitivity magnetometer with a size in the micron range. The artificial atom is a superconducting two-level system at low temperatures, operated in a way similar to atomic magnetometry. The high sensitivity results from quantum coherence combined with strong coupling to magnetic field. By employing projective measurements, we obtain a sensitivity of $2.7\, \t{pT}/\sqrt{\t{Hz}}$ at 10 MHz. We discuss feasible improvements that will increase the sensitivity by over one order of magnitude. The intrinsic sensitivity of this method to AC fields in the 100 kHz - 10 MHz range compares favourably with DC-SQUIDs and atomic magnetometers of equivalent spatial resolution. This result illustrates the potential of artificial quantum systems for sensitive detection and related applications.
Significantly revised and updated version of the manuscript is published in Nature Communications 3:1324 (2012)
References in corpus (12)
- High-sensitivity diamond magnetometer with nanoscale resolution
- Beyond the Jaynes-Cummings model: circuit QED in the ultrastrong coupling regime
- Dynamical decoupling and noise spectroscopy with a superconducting flux qubit
- Amplification and squeezing of quantum noise with a tunable Josephson metamaterial
- Approaching Unit Visibility for Control of a Superconducting Qubit with Dispersive Readout
- Scanning magnetic field microscope with a diamond single-spin sensor
- AC-Stark Shift and Dephasing of a Superconducting Qubit Strongly Coupled to a Cavity Field
- Decoherence of flux qubits due to 1/f flux noise
- High-Resolution Magnetometry with a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate
- Single-spin magnetometry with multi-pulse sensing sequences
- Role of relaxation in the quantum measurement of a superconducting qubit using a nonlinear oscillator
- Flux qubit as a sensor for a magnetometer with quantum limited sensitivity