On-chip Optomechanical Magnetometry

Magnetic sensing is a field of growing interest in situations where other forms of sensing pose difficulties or are impossible, such as sensing of through-earth or underwater signals, navigation, and medical imaging. For a magnetometer to see real-world applications it needs to be portable, inexpensive, and integrable with existing technology and infrastructure. Super-conductor-based designs such as SQUIDS require a large profile to facilitate the low temperatures required, making them impractical for portable magnetometers. To resolve these issues, we designed magnetometers that use both the optical and mechanical resonances of an optical cavity to achieve high sensitivities at low frequencies for use in through-earth communications. To facilitate this focus on portable magnetometers we also designed a centimetre-scale experimental setup including the use of a Red Pitaya for data acquisition and processing. In this talk, I will be summarising our progress is developing portable optomechanical magnetometers for through-earth communications.