Sensitivity of double resonance alignment magnetometers

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates the sensitivity of a double resonance magnetometer using optical pumping, introduces a semi-empirical model for spectra, and presents a method to optimize and analyze its performance across temperatures.

Contribution

It develops an efficient method to predict the optimal operating conditions and determine relaxation rates, including collisional disalignment cross sections, for the magnetometer.

Findings

The semi-empirical model accurately describes the resonance spectra.

The method effectively predicts the optimal light power and Rabi frequency.

The analysis reveals how the optimal operating point varies with temperature.

Abstract

We present an experimental study of the intrinsic magnetometric sensitivity of an optical/rf-frequency double resonance magnetometer in which linearly polarized laser light is used in the optical pumping and detection processes. We show that a semi-empirical model of the magnetometer can be used to describe the magnetic resonance spectra. Then, we present an efficient method to predict the optimum operating point of the magnetometer, i.e., the light power and rf Rabi frequency providing maximum magnetometric sensitivity. Finally, we apply the method to investigate the evolution of the optimum operating point with temperature. The method is very efficient to determine relaxation rates and thus allowed us to determine the three collisional disalignment cross sections for the components of the alignment tensor. Both first and second harmonic signals from the magnetometer are considered and compared.