Abstract
Recent work investigating resonant nonlinear magneto-optical rotation (NMOR) related to long-lived ground-state atomic coherences has demonstrated potential magnetometric sensitivities exceeding for small ) magnetic fields. In the present work, NMOR using frequency-modulated light (FM NMOR) is studied in the regime where the longitudinal magnetic field is in the geophysical range, of particular interest for many applications. In this regime a splitting of the FM NMOR resonance due to the nonlinear Zeeman effect is observed. At sufficiently high light intensities, there is also a splitting of the FM NMOR resonances due to ac Stark shifts induced by the optical field, as well as evidence of alignment-to-orientation conversion type processes. The consequences of these effects for FM-NMOR-based atomic magnetometry in the geophysical field range are considered.
1 More- Received 15 February 2006
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.73.053404
©2006 American Physical Society