Towards analytical calculation of the magnetic flux measured by magnetometers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a near-analytical method for calculating magnetic flux in magnetometers, improving accuracy over traditional cubature approximations, especially for high-frequency components, which is crucial for developing sensitive sensors.

Contribution

The paper presents a near-analytical approach to evaluate magnetic flux through arbitrary pick-up loops, simplifying the calculation and improving accuracy over existing numerical methods.

Findings

Cubature approximations have increasing errors at higher spatial frequencies.

The near-analytical method provides more accurate flux calculations for sensitive magnetometers.

Analytical recursion formulas are derived for tangential circular sensors.

Abstract

This paper reviews magnetic flux signal calculations through pick-up loops using vector spherical harmonic expansion under the quasi-static approximation, and presents a near-analytical method of evaluating the flux through arbitrary parametrizable pick-up loops for each expansion degree. This is done by simplifying the surface flux integral (2D) into a line integral (1D). For the special case of tangential circular sensors, we present a fully analytical recursion calculation. We then compare commonly-used cubature approximations to our (near-)analytical forms, and show that cubature approximations suffer from increasing errors for higher spatial frequency components. This suggests the need for more accurate evaluations for increasingly sensitive sensors that are being developed, and our (near-)analytical forms themselves are a solution to this problem.