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Scientists create quantum sensor that covers entire radio frequency spectrum
- bartwe 7y agoGot to appreciate the usage of Lego in that image.
- tomrod 7y agoNeat! Sounds energy intensive though.
- dmos62 7y agoIt's noted that the sensors would be "very small". Doesn't size translate to energy efficiency?
- fredsmith42 7y agoWould this be applicable to SETI?
- gus_massa 7y agoNo. Any signal that reach here from other star system will be too faint, and you need a huge antena to recollect enough power to detect the signal over the noise. The discovery is very overhyped in the press article (as usual). Also, the detector is small, but it need to be cooled to very low temperatures, so the whole system will be not as small as the article describe.
- mrfusion 7y agoA simple dish or antenna can collect the signal. Size it to your purpose. A sensor is just the last step of what you do with that signal. Think of putting your smart phone camera up to a telescope eyepiece.
- varjag 7y agoAntenna geometry restricts the effective frequency range.
- calibas 7y agoWhere did "cooled to very low temperatures" come from? The Army article said it was done at room temperature: https://www.army.mil/article/212935 https://www.army.mil/article/212935
- greglindahl 7y agoFor radio astronomy purposes, the signal is so weak that thermal noise in the detector is always an issue.
- daedalus2027 7y agorydberg atoms? why they dont tellyou the exact element
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoThe exact element does not actually matter here. What matters is that the atoms in question have some of their electrons in ridiculously highly excited orbitals. This dramatically changes how the system works, and in fact if you have one highly excited electron and many tighly bound core electrons, you can approximate the system by modeling it as hydrogen, regardless of what element it actually is, due to how well the core electrons shield the outer electron from the core.
- lioeters 7y ago> approximate the system by modeling it as hydrogen, regardless of what element it actually is That's fascinating. I found corresponding statements in a Wikipedia article: > Rydberg atoms have a number of peculiar properties including an exaggerated response to electric and magnetic fields, long decay periods and electron wavefunctions that approximate, under some conditions, classical orbits of electrons about the nuclei. > The core electrons shield the outer electron from the electric field of the nucleus such that, from a distance, the electric potential looks identical to that experienced by the electron in a hydrogen atom.
- montalbano 7y agoAny radio hams here have predictions for the use of this technology in amateur radio?
- jdc 7y agoNot a ham, but this is at the "further research is needed" so I predict more papers and grant money.
- FlyMoreRockets 7y agoHam here. To my understanding, this only works with quantum computing. It may take a while before this trickles down to the amateur radio community.
- m-p-3 7y agoImagine having access to this instead of your regular software-defined radio. Now I suppose this device is only able to passively listen to a signal but it cannot transmit on its own, right?
- 4gotunameagain 7y agoTechnically you would have a software defined radio with this as an antenna, and a wideband LNA. /pedantic
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jameshart 7y agoSounds like a key component we would need to make a real tricorder.
- awelkie 7y agoThis seems like it could be useful for UWB communications or a very precise radar. Is it easy to generate an EM impulse with similar bandwidth? I guess the difficulty is to do all signal processing in the optical domain, since it's impractical to digitize all of that spectrum.
- peter_d_sherman 7y agoRelated Paper: Assessment of Rydberg Atoms for Wideband Electric Field Sensing https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.00646 https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.00646 Mentally replace the word "Electric Field" with RF when you're reading it, and you'll get it. Also, according to the paper at least, in theory, laser interferometers can be used to sense RF... which leads to the idea that perhaps the entire RF spectrum, viewed as a single point in time snapshot, looks like an interference pattern of all sorts of waves at all sorts of wavelengths... From a series of those then, Fourier Transforms, ran over the whole dataset, could be used to extract individual waves... Also, there's some kind of vague relationship here with holograms too, because holograms are in effect, interference patterns of two beams of laser light...