A self-locking Rydberg atom electric field sensor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact laser frequency stabilization method for Rydberg atom electric field sensors, enabling reduced size and power requirements with minimal performance loss, suitable for real-world quantum sensing applications.

Contribution

The authors present a novel, low-SWaP-C laser stabilization technique for exciting non-ground atomic transitions, improving practicality of Rydberg atom sensors.

Findings

Sensor bandwidth reduction of only 0.1% for stabilization up to 900 Hz

Successful experimental demonstration of the stabilization technique

Enhanced suitability of Rydberg sensors for real-world applications

Abstract

A crucial step towards enabling real-world applications for quantum sensing devices such as Rydberg atom electric field sensors is reducing their size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) requirements without significantly reducing performance. Laser frequency stabilization is a key part of many quantum sensing devices and, when used for exciting non-ground state atomic transitions, is currently limited to techniques that require either large SWaP-C optical cavities and electronics or use significant optical power solely for frequency stabilization. Here we describe a laser frequency stabilization technique for exciting non-ground state atomic transitions that solves these challenges and requires only a small amount of additional electronics. We describe the operation, capabilities, and limitations of this frequency stabilization technique and quantitatively characterize measure its performance. We show experimentally that Rydberg electric field sensors using this technique are capable of data collection while sacrificing only 0.1% of available bandwidth for frequency stabilization of noise up to 900 Hz.