Dual axis atomic magnetometer and gyroscope enabled by nuclear spin perturbation

Abstract Alkali-noble-gas comagnetometers have become an essential tool for tests of fundamental physics and offer a compact platform for precision gyroscopy. They are, however, limited by technical noise at low frequencies, commonly due to their limited suppression of magnetic noise. Here we investigate a new method for co-magnetometry between a single noble gas and alkali species. While similar to well-known devices using self-compensation, our scheme introduces magnetic pulses that controllably perturb the noble gas and pulsed optical pumping to polarise the alkali atoms. These applied pulses allow our scheme to measure, rather than just suppress, the effect of magnetic noise thereby offering reduced cross-talk. We show numerically that our scheme retrieves four signals (rotations and magnetic fields on two transverse axes) with similar sensitivity to a single axis device. We also present a proof-of-principle experiment based on a <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mtext> </mml:mtext> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>87</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> <mml:mtext>Rb</mml:mtext> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> - <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:msup> <mml:mtext> </mml:mtext> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>129</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> <mml:mtext>Xe</mml:mtext> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> cell. Our data shows a low magnetic-rotation cross-talk of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" overflow="scroll"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>0.2</mml:mn> <mml:mo>±</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0.1</mml:mn> <mml:mstyle scriptlevel="0"/> <mml:mi>μ</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> Hz/pT, which is already on par with the most sensitive devices relying on self-compensation.