Measurement of longitudinal nuclear spin relaxation time in NMR gyroscope by real-time monitoring

Abstract

In the atomic cell of a nuclear magnetic resonance gyroscope, a transverse bias field is applied to enable the in situ alkali magnetometer to sense the variations in the longitudinal magnetic field. During a single relaxation process of the noble gas, the longitudinal relaxation time is obtained by monitoring and fitting the signal of the magnetometer in real-time. The relaxation times measured using our method are nearly identical to those obtained using the conventional delayed pulse method, but in contrast, our method saves ∼90% of the time. By using the new method, fast and accurate batch testing for a large number of atomic cells can be achieved to optimize the manufacturing of the cells, which is helpful in speeding up the development of gyroscopes.