Spin Exchange Optical Pumped 3He Magnetometer for Space Exploration
- Paper number
IAC-15,A3,IP,6,x28898
- Author
Dr. Shuangai Wan, China
- Year
2015
- Abstract
We design a nuclear free precession magnetometer based on spin exchange optically pumped 3He. This atomic magnetometer utilizes a small glass cell containing the Rb and the 3He atoms to sense the magnetic field. The Rb atoms absorb light from a laser at 795nm, and then transfer the polarization to the 3He atoms by spin exchange optical pumping. The spin polarized 3He atoms will precess around the measured magnetic field at a frequency which is proportional to the magnitude of the field. The precession will induce a voltage in a pick-up coil which is used as the signal detector. The 3He has a long coherent spin precession time T2, which is more than hours in general. That makes this type of atomic magnetometer has a theoretical sensitivity of approximately 0.001pT/Hz1/2. Furthermore, the free precession 3He atoms are nearly completely decoupled from the environment, making this type atomic magnetometer has a long stability to achieve a high precision. We demonstrated a prototype of such a magnetometer and achieved a sensitivity of 1pT/Hz1/2 level. Application for such a spin exchange optical pumped 3He magnetometer would be used for deep space exploration, due to its high precision and low power consumption.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
(absent)