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arXiv · 2204.05071

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

Rui Zhang·Dimitra Kanta·Arne Wickenbrock·Hong Guo·Dmitry Budker
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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 $9\,{\rm{fT}}/\sqrt{\rm{Hz}}$ at room temperature.

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Rui Zhang, Dimitra Kanta, Arne Wickenbrock, Hong Guo, Dmitry Budker. 2022-04-11. Heading-error-free optical atomic magnetometry in the Earth-field range. https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.130.153601

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