LAUSR

Atomic vapour magnetometers sense the local magnetic field strength by measuring the resulting precession rate of a well-defined quantum state. An essential prerequisite for this approach is a requirement to drive the media into this quantum state, which is frequently achieved via optical pumping. In real-world alkali-metal atoms, with their multiplicity of ground states, the optical pumping process is necessarily lossy, with a large fraction of the atoms being lost to quantum states that do not contribute to the useful magnetically sensitive signal. This consequently reduces the sensitivity of all optically-pumped atomic sensors. Here we theoretically and experimentally study the population changes of the quantum ground states of 87Rb during optical pumping. We use this understanding to develop a repumping scheme that allows us to increase the number of atoms that are contributing to the useful magnetic sensing output. Unlike prior schemes, our approach delivers this improved sensitivity with significantly suppressed fictitious magnetic fields associated with the repumping, which would otherwise reduce the accuracy of the sensor. When operated at Earth's field strength (∼50µT), the repumped sensor shows a magnetic sensitivity of 200 fT/Hz, that is nearly three times higher than the non-repumped version.