A7.2 - The hunt for mineral resources with quantum magnetometers

Mineral resources and geo-engineering

Metals used in everyday life are produced from ores occurring in the Earth’s crust. Geological processes are known to concentrate minerals to form ores of economic value. Mineral processing engineers concentrate these ores by mechanical and physico-chemical methods while the extractive metallurgist extracts the metals by chemical means.

Superconductive Digital Magnetometers with Single-Flux-Quantum Electronics

Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices (SQUIDs) are known to be the most sensitive magnetometers, used in a wide range of applications like biomagnetism, geomagnetism, Non Destructive Evaluation (NDE), metrology or fundamental science. For all these applications, the SQUID sensor is used in analog mode and associated with a carefully designed room-temperature control and/or feedback elect...

Quantum Computing and the Hunt for Hidden Symmetry

In 1994, Peter Shor gave e cient quantum algorithms for factoring integers and extracting discrete logarithms [20]. If we believe that nature will permit us to faithfully implement our current model of quantum computation, then these algorithms dramatically contradict the Strong Church-Turing thesis. The e ect is heightened by the fact that these algorithms solve computational problems with lon...

Mining and Exploration for Mineral Resources

Cross-validation of microfabricated atomic magnetometers with superconducting quantum interference devices for biomagnetic applications

We compare the performance of a chip-scale atomic magnetometer CSAM with that of a superconducting quantum interference device SQUID sensor in two biomedical applications. Magnetocardiograms MCGs of healthy human subjects were measured simultaneously by a CSAM and a multichannel SQUID sensor in a magnetically shielded room. The typical features of MCGs are resolved by the CSAM, matching the SQU...