HE-XE LASER MAGNETOMETRY

The 3.51 mu m He-3-Xe-136 laser shows promise for applications to mean field magnetometry. A careful analysis of the locking mechanisms is p erformed and experimentally verified. The high gain of the transition and the high mass of the Xe-136 atom permits one to increase the magne tometer scale factor by a factor of 3 compared with Ne-20. Moreover, i n the general case, the width of the locking region is divided by the same factor. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics.