Noise Suppression of Nitrogen-Vacancy Magnetometer in Lock-In Detection Method by Using Common Mode Rejection

Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamonds are promising solid-state magnetic sensors with potential applications in power systems, geomagnetic navigation, and diamond NV color center current transformers, in which both high bandwidth and high magnetic field resolution are required. The wide bandwidth requirement often necessitates high laser power, but this induces significant laser fluctuation noise that affects the detection magnetic field resolution severely. Therefore, enhancement of the magnetic field resolution of wide-bandwidth NV center magnetic sensors is highly important because of the reciprocal effects of the bandwidth and magnetic field resolution. In this article, we develop a common mode rejection (CMR) model to eliminate the laser noise effectively. The simulation results show that the noise level of the light-detected magnetic resonance signal is significantly reduced by a factor of 6.2 after applying the CMR technique. After optimization of the laser power and modulation frequency parameters, the optimal system bandwidth was found to be 75 Hz. Simultaneously, the system’s detection magnetic field resolution was enhanced significantly, increasing from 4.49 nT/Hz(1/2) to 790.8 pT/Hz(1/2), which represents an improvement of nearly 5.7 times. This wide-bandwidth, high-magnetic field resolution NV color center magnetic sensor will have applications including power systems, geomagnetic navigation, and diamond NV color center current transformers.