Heading-error-free optical atomic magnetometry in the Earth-field range

Abstract

Alkali-metal atomic magnetometry is widely used due to its high sensitivity and cryogen-free operation. However, when operating in geomagnetic field, it suffers from heading errors originating from nonlinear Zeeman (NLZ) splittings and magnetic resonance asymmetries, which lead to difficulties in mobile-platform measurements. We demonstrate an alignment based ${}^{87}$Rb magnetometer, which, with only a single magnetic resonance peak and well-separated hyperfine transition frequencies, is insensitive or even immune to NLZ-related heading errors. It is shown that the magnetometer can be implemented for practical measurements in the geomagnetic environments and the photon-shot-noise-limited sensitivity reaches $9\mathrm{fT}/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ at room temperature.

8 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (7)

• Synchronous Optical Pumping of Quantum Revival Beats for Atomic Magnetometery
• Suppression of nonlinear Zeeman effect and heading error in earth-field-range alkali-vapor magnetometers
• Constraints on long-range spin-gravity and monopole-dipole couplings of the proton
• Earth as a transducer for dark-photon dark-matter detection
• Characterization of high-temperature performance of cesium vapor cells with anti-relaxation coating
• Earth as a transducer for axion dark-matter detection
• Interference between two resonant transitions with distinct initial and final states connected by radiative decay

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Optical pumping enhancement of a free-induction-decay magnetometer
• Correcting heading errors in optically pumped magnetometers through microwave interrogation
• All-optical atomic magnetometry using an elliptically polarized amplitude-modulated light wave
• Investigating the hyperfine systematic error and relative phase in low spin-polarization alkali FID magnetometers
• Characterizing current noise of commercial constant-current sources by using of an optically-pumped rubidium atomic magnetometer
• Anomalous suppression of spin-exchange relaxation in alignment signals in cesium in ultra-weak magnetic fields
• Bistability of optical properties of cesium vapor due to collective interaction of alignment and orientation under strong spin exchange conditions