Demonstration of sensitivity increase in mercury free-spin-precession magnetometers due to laser-based readout for neutron electric dipole moment searches

Abstract

We report on a laser based ${}^{199}$Hg co-magnetometer deployed in an experiment searching for a permanent electric dipole moment of the neutron. We demonstrate a more than five times increased signal to-noise-ratio in a direct comparison measurement with its ${}^{204}$Hg discharge bulb-based predecessor. An improved data model for the extraction of important system parameters such as the degrees of absorption and polarization is derived. Laser- and lamp-based data-sets can be consistently described by the improved model which permits to compare measurements using the two different light sources and to explain the increase in magnetometer performance. The laser-based magnetometer satisfies the magnetic field sensitivity requirements for the next generation nEDM experiments.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• The design of the n2EDM experiment
• Magnetic field uniformity in neutron electric dipole moment experiments
• The n2EDM experiment at the Paul Scherrer Institute
• Statistical sensitivity of the nEDM apparatus at PSI to neutron mirror-neutron oscillations
• Search for an interaction mediated by axion-like particles with ultracold neutrons at the PSI
• Johnson-Nyquist Noise Effects in Neutron Electric-Dipole-Moment Experiments
• Optical Magnetometry based Current Source
• A novel technique of extracting UCN lifetimes from storage bottle measurements dominated by scattering losses
• Wigner-Eckart Theorem and the False EDM of ${}^{199}$Hg