Minimizing magnetic fields for precision experiments

TL;DR

This paper presents a new magnetic equilibration scheme for shielded rooms that significantly reduces equilibration time and improves magnetic field homogeneity, enhancing precision in fundamental physics experiments.

Contribution

The authors introduce a novel magnetic equilibration method that shortens process duration and achieves lower, more homogeneous magnetic fields in shielded environments.

Findings

10-fold reduction in equilibration time

40% improvement in statistical measurement reach

Enhanced magnetic field homogeneity

Abstract

An increasing number of measurements in fundamental and applied physics rely on magnetically shielded environments with sub nano-Tesla residual magnetic fields. State of the art magnetically shielded rooms (MSRs) consist of up to seven layers of high permeability materials in combination with highly conductive shields. Proper magnetic equilibration is crucial to obtain such low magnetic fields with small gradients in any MSR. Here we report on a scheme to magnetically equilibrate MSRs with a 10 times reduced duration of the magnetic equilibration sequence and a significantly lower magnetic field with improved homogeneity. For the search of the neutron's electric dipole moment, our finding corresponds to a linear improvement in the systematic reach and a 40 % improvement of the statistical reach of the measurement. However, this versatile procedure can improve the performance of any MSR for any application.