Dr. Peter Schwindt is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories and has been engaged in optical and atomic physics research since 1997 with an emphasis in applying the principles of atomic physics to sensing and timing problems. One of his primary focus areas is OPMs, developing techniques to both miniaturize them and improve their sensitivity and bandwidth. Since 2007, he led a project to develop OPMs for application to MEG. Dr. Schwindt has also worked on multiple atomic clock projects, developing trapped Yb ion microwave and optical clocks, focusing on techniques for miniaturization and low-power-consumption while maintaining excellent long-term frequency stability. Dr. Schwindt has also led a project to miniaturize and extend the dynamic range of an atom interferometer accelerometer while developing a photonic-integrated-circuit-based laser system. Prior to coming to Sandia National Laboratories in 2006, Dr. Schwindt worked as a National Research Council post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. His research there focused on the development of chip-scale atomic clocks and magnetometers. He received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.
Over the past decade, OPMs have proven to be an exciting new to technology for MEG, the measurement and localization of neuronal currents in the human brain. OPMs can be placed close to the brain and can be worn offering new paradigms for MEG measurements for neuroscientists and clinicians. Since 2007, my group at Sandia has been developing OPMs, performing some of the first demonstrations of MEG with compact OPM sensor heads. I will present various aspects of our development efforts. I will describe our first OPM-MEG system where we implemented a 24-channel OPM system inside a person-sized magnetic shield. With the system, we have been able to localize neuronal sources and decode MEG signals using machine learning techniques to determine perceived speech in a closed vocabulary experiment. I will also discuss our most recent effort to toward implementing a 108-channel optically pumped magnetometer (OPM) array in a magnetically shielded room.
Second, I will discuss our efforts in furthering the development of highly miniaturized trapped Yb ion atomic clocks. Notably, we have two miniature ion trap vacuum packages that have been sealed for as long as 10 years with no active pumping. We find the lifetime of the ions within the trap has increased over time for both traps and can be as long as 50 days, and in operating the traps within a clock, we demonstrate a short-term fractional frequency instability of 5×10-13 at 1 s of integration.