In this paper, we proposed a method to characterise the coating performance of alkali-metal cells by directly measuring the energy dissipation during collisions between the anti-relaxation coating surface and atoms in the cell. We confirmed that the energy dissipation during collisions is positively correlated with the relaxation characteristics of alkali metals at various temperatures. This discovery is of great significance as it can be utilised to characterise the anti-relaxation coating performance of alkali-metal cells by directly analysing the energy dissipation of anti-relaxation coatings instead of measuring the relaxation time.

Magnetic field source localization and imaging happen at different scales. The sensing baseline ranges from meter scale, such as magnetic anomaly detection, to centimeter scale, such as brain field imaging, to nanometer scale, such as the imaging of a magnetic skyrmion and single cell. Here, we show how an atomic vapor cell can be used to realize a baseline of 109.6 μm with a magnetic sensitivity of 10 pT/Hz1/2 @0.6–100 Hz and a dynamic range of 2062–4124 nT. We used a free induction decay (FID) scheme to suppress low-frequency noise and avoid scale factor variation for different domains due to light non-uniformity. The measurement domains are scanned by a digital micromirror device. The currents of 22, 30, 38, and 44 mA are applied in the coils to generate different fields along the pumping axis, which are measured respectively by fitting the FID signals of the probe light. The residual fields of every domain are obtained from the intercept of linearly fitting of the measurement data corresponding to these four currents. The coil-generated fields are calculated by deducting the residual fields from the total fields. The results demonstrate that the hole of shield affects both the residual and the coil-generated field distribution. The potential impact of field distribution measurement with outstanding comprehensive properties of spatial resolution, sensitivity, and dynamic range is far-reaching. It could lead to capability of 3D magnetography for small things and/or organs in millimeter or even smaller scale.

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