A fast determination method for transverse relaxation of spin-exchange-relaxation-free magnetometer.

We propose a fast and accurate determination method for transverse relaxation of the spin-exchange-relaxation-free (SERF) magnetometer. This method is based on the measurement of magnetic resonance linewidth via a chirped magnetic field excitation and the amplitude spectrum analysis. Compared with the frequency sweeping via separate sinusoidal excitation, our method can realize linewidth determination within only few seconds and meanwhile obtain good frequency resolution. Therefore, it can avoid the drift error in long term measurement and improve the accuracy of the determination. As the magnetic resonance frequency of the SERF magnetometer is very low, we include the effect of the negative resonance frequency caused by the chirp and achieve the coefficient of determination of the fitting results better than 0.998 with 95% confidence bounds to the theoretical equation. The experimental results are in good agreement with our theoretical analysis.