Abstract
High-sensitivity operation of a radio-frequency atomic magnetometer (RF-AM) requires careful setting of the system parameters, including the lasers intensity and detuning, and the vapour cell temperature. The identification of the optimal operating parameters, which ensures high sensitivity, is typically performed empirically and is often a lengthy process, which is especially labour intensive if frequent retuning of the magnetometer is required to perform different tasks. This paper demonstrates an efficient approach to RF-AM performance optimisation which relies on an open-loop optimisation technique based on Uniform Design (UD). This paper specifically describes the optimisation of an unshielded RF-AM based on a 4-factor-12-level UD of the experimental parameters space. The proposed procedure is shown to lead to the efficient optimisation of the atomic magnetometer at different frequencies, and is applicable to both AC and DC sensitivity optimisation. The procedure does not require any detailed knowledge of the model underlying the operation of the RF-AM and is effective in reducing the number of experimental runs required for the optimisation. It is ideally suited to self-calibration of devices without human supervision.
Highlights
Recent years have witnessed a rapid development in optically pumped atomic magnetometers (AM), which have achieved sub-fT/Hz1/2 sensitivity [1]
For an radio-frequency atomic magnetometer (RF-AM), the operational frequency has in general to be tuned over a broad range so to suit different application contexts, which requires a separate optimisation of the operating parameters for the different frequencies
It follows the standard design of a two-orthogonal-beam RF-AM [25], and is an upgraded version, both in terms of laser system and temperature control of the vapour cell, of the setup described in Refs. [26,27]
Summary
Recent years have witnessed a rapid development in optically pumped atomic magnetometers (AM), which have achieved sub-fT/Hz1/2 sensitivity [1]. The standard approach to optimisation relies on sweeping the experimental parameters separately while ignoring the interactions between them [10] It is performed by adjusting the parameters’ values to obtain the combination of atomic magnetometer response and linewidth leading to maximum sensitivity. This process is time-consuming and requires many tests due to the exponential growth with the number of involved parameters, without considering repetitions required to reduce the measurement errors.
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