No abstract

This article will discuss improved electronically formed gradiometers based on high-temperature radio frequency (rf) superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometers. For gradiometer balancing, a system of adjustable superconducting plates was developed. This technique was used to build first- and second-order, axial gradiometers with adjustable baselines, which operate at 77 K. Each magnetometer combines a washer rf-SQUID with bulk or a thin-film flux concentrator in flip chip geometry. In an unshielded environment, the magnetic field sensitivity in the white noise region is about 80 fT/√Hz for first-order and 150 fT/√Hz for second-order gradiometer. Common mode rejection could be balanced to better than 104 for uniform background fields and better than 200 for gradient fields.

We have fabricated planar first-derivative gradiometers in which an asymmetric flux transformer patterned in a single-layer YBa2Cu3O7−x film is permanently bonded to a directly coupled magnetometer based on a dc superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID). The gradiometer base line is 48 mm. The common mode rejection of uniform magnetic fields is typically one part in a few hundred. The outputs of two such gradiometers are subtracted digitally to form a second-derivative gradiometer. Additionally, three orthogonal SQUID magnetometers are used to reduce the residual response to uniform magnetic fields to better than 100 ppm. The system is able to detect magnetic signals from a human heart in an unshielded environment.

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