High-bandwidth optical magnetometer

We demonstrate a scalar Rb87 optical magnetometer that retains magnetic-field sensitivities below 10pT/√Hzover 3 dB bandwidths of 10 kHz in an ambient field Bo=11.4 μT and using a measurement volume of 1 mm3. The magnetometer operates at high atomic densities where both the sensitivity and the bandwidth are limited by spin-exchange collisions between the alkali atoms. By operating in this regime, our measurements show that the bandwidth of the magnetometer can be increased without a significant degradation in its sensitivity.