2013 IEEE Sensor Journal - Atomic-Signal-Based Zero-Field Finding Technique英文学习资料 .pdfVIP

186 IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 13, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013 Atomic-Signal-Based Zero-Field Finding Technique for Unshielded Atomic Vector Magnetometer Haifeng Dong, Hongbo Lin, and Xinbin Tang Abstract — We describe a novel technique that can find the zero field in Earth’s magnetic field for unshielded laser-pumped atomic magnetometer using atomic signal itself. By comparing light intensity of the pumping beam through atomic vapor cell under different magnetic fields, it decides which direction to move the compensation magnetic field and whether to increase or decrease the magnitude of increments in the compensating field. A convergence criterion is proposed, which not only keeps the field around zero, but also gives the precision of the compensation. The zero field is found in less than 23 s and the field increment after converging is smaller than 0.01, 0.01, and 0.04 µT for the x , y , and z axes, respectively, limited by 50-Hz noise in the laboratory environment. This method uses only one laser beam, which facilitates its application in chip-scale devices. Index Terms— Atomic magnetometer, convergence criterion, laser pumping, self-test, unshielded magnetic field. I. INTRODUCTION IGH SENSITIVITY magnetometer measuring the mag- Hnetic field vectors in an unshielded environment has a wide range of applications from geophysical exploration [1], underwater metal detection [2] to deep space exploration [3]. Although SQUID magnetometer or gradiometer were Fig. 1. Measurement setup. reported to be used for