The present disclosure relates to apparatuses and methods for stimulating a magneto-optical defect material with defect centers in a magnetic detection system using a stimulation process to significantly increase magnetic sensitivity of the detection system. The system utilizes a modified Ramsey pulse sequence pair or a shifted magnetometry adapted cancellation (SMAC) pair to detect and measure the magnetic field acting on the system resulting in mitigation of low-frequency noise sources to provide improved sensor sensitivity. For a SMAC pair measurement, two different values of tau are used as well as two different values of the microwave pulse width.