Subfemtotesla radio-frequency atomic magnetometer for detection of nuclear quadrupole resonance

A radio-frequency tunable atomic magnetometer is developed for detection of nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) from room temperature solids. It has a field sensitivity 0.24fT∕Hz1∕2 at the 423kHz N14 NQR frequency of ammonium nitrate. A potential application of the magnetometer is detection of nitrog...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied physics letters 2006-11, Vol.89 (21)
Main Authors: Lee, S.-K., Sauer, K. L., Seltzer, S. J., Alem, O., Romalis, M. V.
Format: Article
Language:English
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:A radio-frequency tunable atomic magnetometer is developed for detection of nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) from room temperature solids. It has a field sensitivity 0.24fT∕Hz1∕2 at the 423kHz N14 NQR frequency of ammonium nitrate. A potential application of the magnetometer is detection of nitrogen-containing explosives which is difficult with conventional tuned copper coils due to a poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) below a few megahertz. The NQR signal from 22g of powdered ammonium nitrate located 2cm away from the sensor is detected with a SNR of 9 in a 4.4-s-long multiple echo sequence, which represents an estimated order-of-magnitude improvement in sensitivity over the pickup coil detection.
ISSN:0003-6951
1077-3118
DOI:10.1063/1.2390643