Jiang Min, Su Haowen, Wu Ze, Peng Xinhua, Budker Dmitry
Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
CAS Key Laboratory of Microscale Magnetic Resonance, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China.
Sci Adv. 2021 Feb 17;7(8). doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe0719. Print 2021 Feb.
The invention of the maser stimulated revolutionary technologies such as lasers and atomic clocks. Yet, realizations of masers are still limited; in particular, the physics of masers remains unexplored in periodically driven (Floquet) systems, which are generally defined by time-periodic Hamiltonians and enable observation of many exotic phenomena such as time crystals. Here, we investigate the Floquet system of periodically driven Xe gas under damping feedback and unexpectedly observe a multimode maser that oscillates at frequencies of transitions between Floquet states. Our findings extend maser techniques to Floquet systems and open avenues to probe Floquet phenomena unaffected by decoherence, enabling a previously unexplored class of maser sensors. As a first application, our maser offers the capability of measuring low-frequency (1 to 100 mHz) magnetic fields with subpicotesla-level sensitivity, which is substantially better than state-of-the-art magnetometers and can be applied to, for example, ultralight dark matter searches.
微波激射器的发明催生了诸如激光和原子钟等革命性技术。然而,微波激射器的实现仍然有限;特别是,在周期性驱动(弗洛凯)系统中,微波激射器的物理原理仍未得到探索,这类系统通常由时间周期哈密顿量定义,并能观测到许多奇异现象,如时间晶体。在此,我们研究了在阻尼反馈下周期性驱动氙气的弗洛凯系统,并意外观测到一种多模微波激射器,它在弗洛凯态之间的跃迁频率处振荡。我们的发现将微波激射器技术扩展到了弗洛凯系统,并为探测不受退相干影响的弗洛凯现象开辟了途径,从而实现了一类此前未被探索的微波激射器传感器。作为首个应用,我们的微波激射器具备以亚皮特斯拉级灵敏度测量低频(1至100毫赫兹)磁场的能力,这比现有最先进的磁力计要好得多,可应用于例如超轻暗物质搜索等领域。