A High-Sensitivity Single-Beam Triaxial Atomic Magnetometer Based on Optical Fiber Transmission

The SERF atomic magnetometer is nowadays the most sensitive equipment for magnetic field measurement. As used in triaxial magnetic field measurements, however, the weak interaction of the polarized atoms with the magnetic field in the pump light direction results in low sensitivity in that direction. To solve this issue, a single-beam orthogonal pumping triaxial atomic magnetometer based on a double-cell structure is demonstrated. In this paper, we use a beam-splitter to split the pumping light beam equally, so that the proposed triaxial atomic magnetometer can respond to magnetic fields in all three axes simultaneously, and with no sacrifice in sensitivity. The experiments have shown that the magnetometer has a sensitivity of 46fT/Hz
^1/2
on the x-axis, 32fT/Hz
^1/2
on the y-axis, and 40fT/Hz
^1/2
on the z-axis. This magnetometer has great potential for applications where the three components of the magnetic field need to be measured.