The micro-fabrication and performance analysis of non-magnetic heating chip for miniaturized SERF atomic magnetometer

Abstract

The elevated temperature field is one of the fundamental conditions for the spin-exchange relaxation-free (SERF) regime, which can be accomplished by electric heating chip without introducing stray field. Therefore, a non-magnetic heating chip composed of double identical ring-structure layers with a silicon oxide insulating layer between them is carefully designed and fabricated with the material of nichrome alloy on a borosilicate glass substrate by Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology. What’s more, the influence of annealing treatment process on the microstructure of the heating chip is characterized and explicated utilizing modern surface science technique, including four-probe meter, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and atomic force microscope (AFM). Then, the integrated miniature single-beam SERF atomic magnetometer is developed based on the microfabricated heating chip. The temperature stability of heating chip is tested with the value less than ± 10 mK at 120 °C by the proportional integral derivative (PID) control program, and the magnetic current coefficient is determined of only 0.506 nT/mA by the spin resonance response of the SERF atomic magnetometer near the zero field. Finally, the developed SERF atomic magnetometer achieves a high measuring sensitivity of 70 fT/Hz1/2. These experimental results provide a new avenue for the wafer-level microfabrication of the high-performance non-magnetic heating chip. More importantly, the presented work paves the way towards chip-scale atomic magnetometers with high sensitivity and mm-scale spatial resolution in the applications of magnetic source imaging and magnetic anomaly detection.