PIs

John Kitching 🔗

Group Leader / NIST Fellow, National Institute of Standards and Technology (Boulder) 🔗

Research areas:

OPM Biomagnetism (MEG/MCG)
Zero- to Ultralow-Field NMR (ZULF)
Chip-Scale and Wearable SERF Sensor Engineering

Techniques:

Chip-scale integrated-circuit NMR spectrometer
Coherent population trapping (CPT) vapor-cell atomic clock
Spin-exchange relaxation-free (SERF) atomic magnetometry

Tags:

atomic vapour magnetometry OPM
chip-scale CPT atomic clock
chip-scale NMR
OPM instrumentation

Email:

Status: unreviewed revisit date: None Application status: none LOR status: not_needed

Department(s)/lab(s): Time and Frequency Division | Atomic Devices and Instrumentation Group @ NISTBoulder

Summary:

Kitching pioneered chip-scale atomic clocks and magnetometers, combining atomic spectroscopy, silicon micromachining and photonics, with applications to biomagnetism (MEG/MCG) and microfluidic NMR. This vapour-phase approach reaches femto-to-picotesla sensitivities complementary to NV-center diamond ensemble quantum sensors (DEER, nano-NMR, T1 relaxometry) that operate near the pT/sqrt(Hz) regime.

Created at: July 18, 2026, 10:44 p.m. Updated at: July 18, 2026, 10:44 p.m. Metadata: Verified 2026-07; NIST Boulder.