But perhaps the underlying technology is a superconducting SQUID.
The ability to detect a heartbeat from distance is far fetched though.
The have a non contact MCG, like a EKG, but no electrical contacts. They can definitely "see" the heart beating from a few feet away.
SandboxAQ is also developing a navigation version. Put this sensitive magnetometer on a plane. You get very sensitive measurements of the local magnetic field. Once they have a region mapped, you can get exact positioning just from measuring magnetic fields.
You can extrapolate from SandboxAQ and get long range detection of a human heart. I don't know if it's real, but if so it's probably came out of that research effort.
I think the term you're looking for is atomic-optical magnetometer. Someone posted a DARPA project (AMBIIENT), that uses one. What's special about the atomic-optical magnetometer, is that it measures the gradient directly. With SQUID, if you have two SQUIDs in a uniform magnetic field, you can't determine the vector of the field. But, with atomic-optical magnetometry you can.
SQUID sensors (the most sensitive magnetometers that exist) require magnetically shielded rooms to record cardiac signals at centimeter range.
What they are saying is that they produced a low noise sensor array and managed to increase the SNR through computation. They also stated that it was an ideal environment with no other electrical/magnetic interference.
Not anymore. That is exactly the purpose of Darpa Ambient program: https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/atomic-magnetometer-...
Demo from 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTnIXWCBYTw
As with all DARPA projects, there is a civilian use-case and a military use-case.
That demo was at a conference, in a city, surrounded by electronics and RF noise. The fact that it worked at all in that environment is surprising. As the subject got closer to the apparatus, the signal became larger than the background noise. So, I think the distance is limited mostly by background noise. The press release did state that it was an optimal environment for locating their target, i.e., an isolated person with only geomagnetic noise and known signatures of the aircraft.
Oh, but you say that you simply cool the sensor to 0K. Cooling helps, but you're still many orders of magnitude short even at near 0K, and you're doing this in Iranian mountains, not a dilution refrigerator.
> A magnetic dipole doesn't radiate energy outward the way a radio antenna does.
See Section 15-5 of https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_15.html#Ch15-S5
Veritasium has a video on the weirdness of MVP: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XKSjCOKDtpk
See https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/13/2/025127/2877320/Dif... for an experiment measuring MVP with an optical-atomic magnetometer.
> Oh, but you say that you simply cool the sensor to 0K.
These sensors do not require cryogenics and have been developed with sensitivities of 10s of fT/√Hz, so approaching the quantum noise limit.
Essentially, you can think of it as measuring the energy of a magnetic dipole in space instead of measuring a magnetic field.