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Design and performance of an absolute 3He/Cs magnetometer

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Abstract

We report on the design and performance of a highly sensitive combined 3He/Cs magnetometer for the absolute measurement of magnetic fields. The magnetometer relies on the magnetometric detection of the free spin precession of nuclear spin polarized 3He gas by optically pumped cesium magnetometers. We plan to deploy this type of combined magnetometer in an experiment searching for a permanent electric dipole moment of ultracold neutrons at the Paul-Scherrer Institute (Switzerland). A prototype magnetometer was built at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and tested at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (Berlin, Germany). We demonstrate that the combined magnetometer allows Cramér-Rao-limited field determinations with recording times in the range of, measurements above being limited by the stability of the applied magnetic field. With a recording time we were able to perform an absolute measurement of a magnetic field of ≈ with a standard uncertainty of, corresponding to ΔB/B < 6 ×10−8.

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Author notes

  1. Paul Knowles

    Present address: LogrusData, Vienna, Austria

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Physics Department, University of Fribourg, 1700, Fribourg, Switzerland

    Hans-Christian Koch, Zoran D. Grujić, Malgorzata Kasprzak, Paul Knowles & Antoine Weis

  2. Department of Physics, Johannes Gutenberg-University, 55122, Mainz, Germany

    Hans-Christian Koch, Werner Heil & Andreas Kraft

  3. Paul Scherrer Institute, 5232, Villigen, Switzerland

    Georg Bison

  4. Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt Institut, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Allard Schnabel & Jens Voigt

  5. Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, 194021, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Anatoly Pazgalev

Authors
  1. Hans-Christian Koch
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  2. Georg Bison
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  8. Anatoly Pazgalev
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Correspondence to Hans-Christian Koch.

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Koch, HC., Bison, G., Grujić, Z.D. et al. Design and performance of an absolute 3He/Cs magnetometer. Eur. Phys. J. D 69, 202 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2015-60018-7

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