Analysis and Correction of the Crosstalk Effect in a Three-Axis SERF Atomic Magnetometer

Abstract

Three-axis atomic magnetometers have an excellent advantage for determining the complete vector information of a magnetic field to be measured. However, the crosstalk effect, which leads to an error output on one axis owing to a magnetic field on the other axes, can reduce the measurement accuracy. In this study, we propose an effective suppression method for the crosstalk effect in a three-axis atomic magnetometer. First, we investigated and analyzed the main factors that introduce the effect. Based on this, the modulation parameters were optimized to improve the scale factors, which obtained a coupling coefficient of less than 6% for the atomic magnetometer. Subsequently, the associated transfer matrix was corrected to further suppress the crosstalk effect. After correction, all the coupling coefficients were decreased to less than 3%, with the majority being lower than 1%.

Keywords

• three-axis magnetometer
• crosstalk effect
• density matrix equation
• magnetic fields measurement