Influence of skew light propagation on electron spin polarization in an atomic magnetometer

Atomics magnetometers achieve remarkable accuracy, applying to production and scientific research. However, their size and bulk components make it difficult to achieve higher accuracy. We investigate the influence of the skew angle of the pump beam on the optical pumping rate in an atomic magnetometer. An analysis based on the Bloch equation is proposed to decrease evaluate optical errors in the process of production and assembly. When the incident angle is non-zero, the pumping rate has a projection in the direction of a static magnetic field. By establishing the pumping rate equation, the pumping rate of each position in the vapor cell in the direction of static magnetic field at different pump light skew angles is calculated in our study. The sensitivity was measured experimentally to demonstrate the simulation results. The results indicate that the optical pumping rate decreases as the amplitude of skew angle and propagation distance increasing which can be evaluated by one-dimensional distribution while the decay rate increases with the rise of the angle. The simulation values of the rubidium pumping rate, obtained with an incident angle of 0.5^◦, in the center of the vapor cell are reduced by 46%. The sensitivity decreases with the increasing skew angle similar to the attenuation trend of the optical pumping rate but not the same. Our work provides a reference for evaluating the optical error of atomic magnetometer which is useful for miniaturization design.