Schultze, V.; Scholtes, T.; Oelsner, G.; Wittkaemper, F.; Wieduwilt, T.; Stolz, R. An Optically Pumped Magnetometer with Omnidirectional Magnetic Field Sensitivity. Sensors2023, 23, 6866.
Schultze, V.; Scholtes, T.; Oelsner, G.; Wittkaemper, F.; Wieduwilt, T.; Stolz, R. An Optically Pumped Magnetometer with Omnidirectional Magnetic Field Sensitivity. Sensors 2023, 23, 6866.
Schultze, V.; Scholtes, T.; Oelsner, G.; Wittkaemper, F.; Wieduwilt, T.; Stolz, R. An Optically Pumped Magnetometer with Omnidirectional Magnetic Field Sensitivity. Sensors2023, 23, 6866.
Schultze, V.; Scholtes, T.; Oelsner, G.; Wittkaemper, F.; Wieduwilt, T.; Stolz, R. An Optically Pumped Magnetometer with Omnidirectional Magnetic Field Sensitivity. Sensors 2023, 23, 6866.
Abstract
In mobile applications such as geomagnetic surveying, two major effects hamper the use of optically pumped magnetometers: dead zones, sensor orientations where the sensors signal amplitude drops; and heading errors, a dependence of the measured magnetic field value on the sensor orientation. We present a concept for an omnidirectional magnetometer to overcome both these effects. The sensor uses two cesium vapor cells, interrogated by circularly-polarized amplitude-modulated laser light split into two beams running perpendicular to each other. This configuration is experimentally investigated using a setup wherein the laser beam and magnetic field direction can be freely adjusted relative to each other within a magnetically shielded environment. We demonstrate that a dead-zone free magnetometer can be realized with nearly isotropic magnetic-field sensitivity. While in the current configuration we observe heading errors emerging from light shifts and due to the nonlinear Zeeman effect, we introduce a straightforward approach to suppress these systematic effects in an advanced sensor realisation.
Keywords
magnetometer; optically pumped magnetometer; dead zone; heading error; intensity modulation; amplitude modulation; light shift; nonlinear Zeeman effect; atomic magnetic sensor
Subject
Physical Sciences, Atomic and Molecular Physics
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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