Simultaneous Detection, Demodulation, and Angle-of-Arrival Determination of Communication Signals Using a Dual Ladder Rydberg Receiver

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a dual ladder Rydberg receiver capable of simultaneous detection, demodulation, and angle-of-arrival determination of communication signals, offering advantages over traditional heterodyne systems.

Contribution

The work introduces a dual ladder Rydberg receiver that enables direct baseband readout and angle-of-arrival detection, improving upon conventional Rydberg mixers.

Findings

Dual ladder system achieves simultaneous detection and demodulation.

Performance comparable to heterodyne system after noise correction.

Dual ladder design is not limited by signal amplitude decay.

Abstract

In a typical Rydberg mixer, modulated communication signals are detected using a radio frequency (RF) heterodyne technique. The mixer outputs an intermediate frequency (IF), which must be filtered and mixed down to baseband. In this work, we apply an RF-homodyne technique to demonstrate simultaneous detection and a direct, baseband readout of the in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components of standard communication signals using a dual ladder Rydberg receiver. We further show that the inherent polarization sensitivity of this receiver can be used to determine the signal's angle of arrival. We also compare the dual ladder system with a typical Rydberg mixer. The RF-heterodyne-based system's maximum detectable symbol rate is constrained by a signal amplitude which decays with the heterodyne field's detuning from the Rydberg-Rydberg atomic transition used to detect the signal, but the dual ladder design is not subject to this limitation. However, the dual ladder system is more sensitive to low-frequency noise. As a result, its performance is degraded relative to its conventional counterpart when subjected to pink noise. We show that once pink noise effects have been accounted for, both systems behave comparably.