New design for a high performance optically pumped cesium beam tube

An optically pumped cesium beam resonator has been designed including three successive magnetic field regions. The optical interactions take place in the first and third regions, where the magnetic field has the required value of 3*10/sup -5/ T. The microwave interaction occurs in the intermediate region, where the value of the C-field is typically set to 4*10/sup -6/ T. It has been verified that the magnetic field profile along the cesium beam does not induce Majorana transitions. Using a single laser diode emitting at 852 nm with a linewidth of about 30 MHz, the resonator gives an excellent amplitude signal to noise ratio equal to 20000 in a 1-Hz bandwidth. >