A novel oven structure for improving temperature uniformity of vapor cell in atomic sensors

•A novel double-layer cylindrical oven.•Improvement of temperature uniformity of the vapor cell and increasing of the output signal amplitude of the SERF atomic magnetometer.•Analysis about heating performance of the double-layer cylindrical oven and the temperature uniformity of the vapor cell using this oven.•Further promote the application of atomic sensors especially the highly-sensitive SERF atomic magnetometer. Alkali-metal vapor cells are key elements of atomic sensors. The temperature uniformity in the vapor cell is important for the sensitivity of the atomic sensors especially highly-sensitive SERF atomic magnetometers. This study proposes a novel double-layer cylindrical oven to improve the heating performance and the temperature uniformity of the vapor cell. We use the finite element method to build the thermal simulation models of the conventional square oven and the novel double-layer cylindrical oven. The performances of two ovens are compared. Then we build the experimental system to carry out the measurement experiment of heating temperature of the conventional and novel ovens and the in-situ measurement experiment of temperature distribution of the vapor cell using different ovens. We also measure the change of output signal amplitude of the SERF atomic magnetometer with frequency, i.e. the frequency response R(f) using the conventional and novel ovens respectively to evaluate the performance of the SERF atomic magnetometer using different ovens. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed oven structure can improve the temperature uniformity of the alkali-metal vapor cell by 63.63% and the amplitude of R(f) using the novel oven increases by 24.7% on average. The novel double-layer cylindrical oven improves the temperature uniformity in the alkali-metal vapor cell and increases amplitude of the output signal of the SERF atomic magnetometer. The study is of great significance for improving the sensitivity of the atomic sensors especially SERF atomic magnetometers.