Progress on a new pulsed $^{87}$Rb-$^{21}$Ne co-magnetometer

Atomic co-magnetometers are sensitive gyroscopes and have also been used in many precision measurements to look for new physics beyond the Standard Model. In particular an alkali metal-noble gas co-magnetometer has been successfully used to place stringent limits on Lorentz and CPT violating interactions, anomalous spin-mass and spin-spin interactions. However, the signal of such a co-magnetometer suffers from low frequency drifts of the CW optical pumping light used to polarize the atoms. We report here the development of a new pulsed $^{87}$Rb-$^{21}$Ne co-magnetometer that has the potential to overcome these limitations. In this scheme, $^{87}$Rb is spin polarized by a short circularly polarized laser pulse and is then probed by off-resonant linearly polarized light. Fitting the decay signal to a model allows us to extract the signal of interest. We present simulation and experimental results of the pulsed co-magnetometer, calibrate the signal using Earth's rotation, and describe the low-frequency behavior of the system.