Programmatic Sequence for the Automatic Adjustment of Double Relaxation Oscillation SQUID Sensors

Measuring magnetic fields with a SQUID sensor always requires preliminary adjustments such as optimum bas current determination and flux-locking point search. A conventional magnetoencephalography (MEG) system consists of several dozens of sensors and we should condition each sensor one by one for an experiment. This timeconsuming job is not only cumbersome but also impractical for the common use in hospital. We had developed a serial port communication protocol between SQUID sensor controllers and a personal computer in order to control the sensors. However, theserial-bus-based control is too slow for adjusting all the sensors with a sufficient accuracy in a reasonable time. In this work, we introduce programmatic control sequence that saves the number of the control pulse arrays. The sequence separates into two stages. The first stage is a function for searching flux-locking points of the sensors and the other stage is for determining the optimum bias current that operates a sensor in a minimum noise level Generally, the optimum bias current for a SQUID sensor depends on the manufactured structure, so that it will not easily change about. Therefore, we can reduce the time for the optimum bias current determination by using the saved values that have been measured once by the second stage sequence. Applying the first stage sequence to a practical use, it has taken about 2-3 minutes to perform the flux-locking for our 37-channel SQUID magnetometer system.