All-Optical Magnetometric Sensor for Magnetoencephalography and Ultralow Field Tomography
A. K. Vershovskiĭ, A. S. Pazgalev, М. В. Петренко
Abstract
A variant of the scheme of a magnetometric sensor based on cesium atomic vapor is proposed and experimentally investigated. The sensor uses magnetic resonance excitation by modulated light of an hyperfine optical pumping that is transverse to the magnetic field. It is shown that, for a cell with a volume of 0.125 cm3, the variational sensitivity of such a scheme, estimated from the ratio of the steepness of the signal in the center of the magnetic resonance to the shot noise of the detecting radiation, reaches a level of <10 fT/Hz1/2 in the frequency band width of the order of 850 Hz. The sensor, which does not emit radio frequency fields, is designed for use in magnetoencephalographic complexes. Possible ways to improve the performance of the scheme for detecting relatively fast (~4.2 kHz in a field of 0.1 mT) signals of the precession of proton magnetic moments in promising ultra-weak field tomography schemes are considered.