English

Light shift averaging in paraffin-coated alkali vapor cells

Atomic Physics 2016-08-24 v1

Abstract

Light shifts are an important source of noise and systematics in optically pumped magnetometers. We demonstrate that the long spin coherence time in paraffin-coated cells leads to spatial averaging of the light shifts over the entire cell volume. This renders the averaged light shift independent, under certain approximations, of the light-intensity distribution within the sensor cell. These results and the underlying mechanism can be extended to other spatially varying phenomena in anti-relaxation-coated cells with long coherence times.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1511.05345,
  title  = {Light shift averaging in paraffin-coated alkali vapor cells},
  author = {Elena Zhivun and Arne Wickenbrock and Julia Sudyka and Szymon Pustelny and Brian Patton and Dmitry Budker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.05345},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures