A new magnetic field system for 3He polarization

Abstract

The nuclear spin-polarized 3He gas has been in depth studied and widely used in various scientific experiments. The polarized 3He gas can be used as a polarized neutron target to study the reaction of neutrons with charged particles or photon beams. On the other hand, spin polarized 3He gas is a good probe for detecting the new interactions in the supernormal model, and has many other applications as follows:the spin-dependent interaction can be studied quantitatively by measuring the NMR frequency shift but the spin-dependent interaction can also be studied by measuring the relaxation time of polarized 3He gas; the polarized 3He gas can be applied to magnetometers and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI); the highly polarized 3He gas can be used as a neutron spin filter for neutron polarization and polarization analysis because of the high correlation between the absorption cross section of the neutron in polarized 3He nucleus and the spin orientation. At present, the three major domestic sources of neutron, CMRR, CARR, and CSNS, are used to study the neutron polarization and polarization analysis techniques based on spin polarized 3He gas. The longitudinal (or spin-lattice) relaxation time (i.e., T1) of 3He is a key parameter that limits the polarizability of 3He gas. In order to reduce the effect of magnetic field gradient on the longitudinal relaxation time of polarized 3He gas, large-sized Helmholtz coils are usually constructed to provide the main magnetic field where the uniformity in the magnetic field central region reaches 10-4 cm-1. To obtain enough magnetic field uniformity, some magnetic field systems even exceed 1.5 m in size. However, it is expected to have a small magnetic field configuration from the view of practicality and convenience. For the common size (3He cells, Merritt coil and Saddle coil can effectively reduce the size of the magnetic field apparatus. However, for electron scattering experiments of 3He cells, the chamber length can be 40 cm. The system length exceeds 1 m even by using the Merritt coil. In this work, a new six-coil system for 3He polarization is obtained. Within the coils, the magnetic field gradient satisfies the requirement that √|▽Bx|2+|▽By|2/B0 -4 cm-1 in more than 30% area, which is better than all the existing coils used in polarized 3He experiments and can be applied to the future 3He instruments. For other experiments that require magnetic field to have a large uniform area, the new six-coil system is also a good option.