High Performance Single Element MI Magnetometer With Peak-to-Peak Voltage Detector by Synchronized Switching

We propose a new high performance magnetometer using a single magneto-impedance (MI) sensor with a peak-to-peak voltage detector by synchronized switching (shortened: Pk-pk VD-type MI magnetometer), which is aimed to measure an extremely weak magnetic field ranging from nT (10^-9 T) to pT (10^-12 T), based upon the conventional MI magnetometer, which is used in the electronic compass. In order to enhance sensitivity and reduce noise, the Pk-pk VD-type MI magnetometer detects both the positive peak and the negative peak in induced voltage waveform of pickup coil. In this paper, for demonstrating the performances of the Pk-pk VD-type MI magnetometer, we investigate the magnetic field sensitivity and the magnetic noise spectral density. We demonstrated that the noise level of the Pk-pk VD-type MI magnetometer is lower than 2 pT/Hz^1/2 for the frequency range from 1 to 100 Hz, which is much better than the conventional MI magnetometer. We discuss the noise performance of the Pk-pk VD-type MI magnetometer. According to the results obtained in this paper, we expect that this proposed MI magnetometer can be widely used for extremely weak magnetic field detection.