An accurate optical technique for measuring the nuclear polarisation of 3He gas

12 pages; International audience; In the metastability exchange optical pumping cells of our on-site production unit and of our other experimental set-ups, we use a light absorption technique to measure the 3He nuclear polarisation. It involves weak probe beams at 1083 nm, that are either perpendicular or parallel to the magnetic field and cell axis, with suitable light polarisations. When metastability exchange collisions control the populations of the sublevels in the 23S state, absolute values of the 3He ground state nuclear polarisation are directly inferred from the ratio of the absorption rates measured for these probe beams. Our report focuses on the transverse detection scheme for w…