Optimizing Rydberg Antennas

Given their low electromagnetic profile, specially prepared atomic Rydberg vapors have already demonstrated improvement over conventional wire antennas as calibration standards for electric field measurements. Major efforts are now under way to develop practical room temperature Rydberg atom RF receivers with greater sensitivity, bandwidth, and dynamic range than any classical receiver. In this presentation I will summarize theoretical analysis of various laser and RF local oscillator setups, with the goal of optimizing the underlying electromagnetic transparency (EIT) sensitivity against environmental noise, atomic motion-induced Doppler, RF communication signal waveform, and other important effects. At the heart of the analysis is a carefully controlled resonant coupling of the low energy core and highly excited Rydberg atomic level subspaces. The incident RF signal perturbation of the Rydberg state amplitudes then induces a corresponding large perturbation of the core state amplitudes. This nonequilibrium multistate entanglement is enabled by an effective Hamiltonian eigenvalue near-degeneracy whose avoided crossing produces the required extreme sensitivity. This formulation of the problem enables a very efficient method for optimizing various proposed experimental setup designs.