Abstract
Microscopic imaging of local magnetic fields provides a window into the organizing principles of complex and technologically relevant condensed-matter materials. However, a wide variety of intriguing strongly correlated and topologically nontrivial materials exhibit poorly understood phenomena outside the detection capability of state-of-the-art high-sensitivity high-resolution scanning probe magnetometers. We introduce a quantum-noise-limited scanning probe magnetometer that can operate from room-to-cryogenic temperatures with unprecedented dc-field sensitivity and micron-scale resolution. The Scanning Quantum Cryogenic Atom Microscope (SQCRAMscope) employs a magnetically levitated atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), thereby providing immunity to conductive and blackbody radiative heating. The SQCRAMscope has a field sensitivity of 1.4 nT per resolution-limited point (approximately ) or per point at its duty cycle. Compared to point-by-point sensors, the long length of the BEC provides a naturally parallel measurement, allowing one to measure nearly 100 points with an effective field sensitivity of for each point during the same time as a point-by-point scanner measures these points sequentially. Moreover, it has a noise floor of 300 pT and provides nearly 2 orders of magnitude improvement in magnetic flux sensitivity (down to ) over previous atomic probe magnetometers capable of scanning near samples. These capabilities are carefully benchmarked by imaging magnetic fields arising from microfabricated wire patterns in a system where samples may be scanned, cryogenically cooled, and easily exchanged. We anticipate the SQCRAMscope will provide charge-transport images at temperatures from room temperature to 4 K in unconventional superconductors and topologically nontrivial materials.
11 More- Received 19 October 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.7.034026
© 2017 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Viewpoint
Sensing Magnetic Fields with a Giant Quantum Wave
Published 27 March 2017
A refined version of a Bose-Einstein-condensate microscope detects static magnetic fields near the surface of a chip with unprecedented sensitivity and over a wide temperature range.
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