A fast pneumatic sample-shuttle with attenuated shocks

We describe a home-built pneumatic shuttle suitable for the fast displacement of samples in the vicinity of a highly sensitive atomic magnetometer. The samples are magnetized at 1 T using a Halbach assembly of magnets. The device enables the remote detection of free-induction-decay in ultra-lowfield and zero-field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments, in relaxometric measurements and in other applications involving the displacement of magnetized samples within time intervals as short as a few tens of milliseconds. Other possible applications of fast sample shuttling exist in radiological studies, where samples have to be irradiated and then analyzed in a 'cold' environment

Two-color CPT in a Single Cs Hyperfine Transition, Application in Magnetometry

We investigate the coherent population trapping effect occurring between the Zeeman sublevels of a given hy- perfine state of Cs when excited by a single-mode diode laser, which is frequency modulated in the kHz­MHz range. In the presence of a dc magnetic field, simultaneous excitation of pairs of ground-state magnetic sublevels to common excited mag- netic sublevels is performed. As a result, coherent population trapping resonance is detected at only a given modulation fre- quency, whose value gives a measure of the magnetic field. The parameters of the resonances are measured in order to determine the ultimate accuracy of the magnetic field measurement