Portable Magnetometry for Detection of Biomagnetism in Ambient Environments

The authors report a striking advance in measuring tiny magnetic fields under ambient conditions, using atom--light-interaction techniques enabled by cutting-edge technology. A prototype sensor detects the magnetic fields generated by the human brain or heart, in a field-deployable system that works with great sensitivity, unshielded in Earth's own magnetic field. This technology is scalable to arrays and can be made low-cost, which opens pathways to a wide variety of applications, such as field triage, brain-machine interfaces, and magnetic navigation.