“Rydberg-atom based sensors have only recently been considered for general electric field sensing applications, including as a communications receiver. “These new sensors can be very small and virtually undetectable, giving Soldiers a disruptive advantage,” Meyer said. The researchers calculated the receiver’s channel capacity, or rate of data transmission, based on fundamental principles, and then achieved that performance experimentally in their lab-improving on other groups’ results by orders of magnitude, Meyer said. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory. In 2018, Army scientists were the first in the world to create a quantum receiver that uses highly excited, super-sensitive atoms-known as Rydberg atoms-to detect communications signals, said David Meyer, a scientist at the U.S.

Such wide spectral coverage by a single antenna is impossible with a traditional receiver system, and would require multiple systems of individual antennas, amplifiers and other components. ArmyĪ quantum sensor could give Soldiers a way to detect communication signals over the entire radio frequency spectrum, from 0 to 100 GHz, said researchers from the Army. They detect the electric fields (coming from the gold antenna in the background) and imprint the information back onto the laser beams. Atoms in a glass vapor cell are excited with laser beams to Rydberg states.

New quantum receiver radio frequency