Analysis and suppression of the polarization error for the optical rotation detection system in an atomic comagnetometer

Abstract

This paper investigates the laser polarization error in the optical rotation detection system (ORDS) of an atomic comagnetometer (ACM), which will seriously degrade the long-term performance of the ORDS. We first establish an optical transmission model of the ORDS by using Jones matrix concerning the optical imperfection of polarizers. Then, we analyze the polarization error based on this model and propose a novel error suppression method. Finally, we experimentally test the long-term performance of the ORDS and the ACM before and after the polarization error suppression to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the long-term performance of the ORDS and the ACM can be improved by approximately 3.4 times with the proposed polarization error suppression method.