Cold-atom array improves wireless signal sensing and data decoding
Cold-Atom Rydberg Array with Spatiotemporal Multiplexing for High-Sensitivity Wireless Communications
Information Theory
Summary
Wireless communication signals are often hard to detect clearly because of noise and physical limits like heat and motion in atoms. The authors study a special system called a cold-atom Rydberg array that can sense signals very precisely by reducing these limits. They propose a new way to read signals continuously without gaps and a method to better interpret the noisy data. Their approach makes it easier to use these quantum sensors for reliable wireless communication.
What this means in practice
- •For wireless communication engineers: Enable wireless receivers with quantum sensors that sample signals continuously and detect weak signals more accurately to improve data decoding reliability.
- •For quantum hardware developers: Incorporate subarray scheduling and advanced state estimation to overcome temporal and noise limitations in cold-atom based quantum sensing devices.
Authors
Jian Xiao, Tierui Gong, Chau Yuen
Abstract
An effective Cold-Atom Rydberg Array (CoRA) architecture is investigated, which addresses the fundamental thermal noise limit in classical electromagnetics and intrinsic Doppler broadening as well as photon shot noise in conventional hot-vapor cell-based atomic receivers. However, translating the CoRA-based quantum electrometers into practical wireless communication receivers is bottlenecked by both the macroscopic readout dead-times and nonlinear binomial population counts rather than the additive-Gaussian baseband samples in conventional receivers. To address these critical challenges and facilitate the practicality of the CoRA, in this paper, a subarray scheduling-based spatiotemporal multiplexing (STM) framework is first proposed for gap-free symbol interrogation within an admitted packet. Additionally, a signal detection scheme based on a joint binomial particle smoother (JBPS) is proposed for burst-wise state and data inference. Furthermore, the weak-signal quantum-projection-noise (QPN) limit and the state-averaged finite-alphabet rate are derived for CoRA-assisted wireless communications. Numerical results demonstrate that: 1) The proposed STM-based CoRA scheme resolves the macroscopic temporal bottleneck for continuous signal sampling; 2) The proposed JBPS approach effectively mitigates the nonlinear noise amplification to achieve a lower bit error rate; and 3) Performance analysis reveals a fundamental sensitivity-sustainability tradeoff that increasing the number of atoms effectively suppresses the QPN, but simultaneously reduces the sustainable packet repetition rate.