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We're one step closer to atomic radio
Scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, have brought us one step closer to "atomic radio" by using an atom-based receiver to make a stereo recording of music streamed into the laboratory—namely, Queen's "Under Pressure." They described their work in a new paper in AIP Advances.
So-called "Rydberg atoms" are atoms that are in an especially excited state well above their ground (lowest-energy) state. This makes them extra-sensitive to passing electric fields, like the alternating fields of radio waves. All you need is a means of detecting those interactions to turn them into quantum sensors—like a laser. That means, in principle, that Rydberg atoms could receive and play back radio signals.
[...] The recordings aren't going to challenge the dominance of digital recording any time soon, since they are of much lower sound quality, more akin to an old vinyl record. That said, "My vision is to cut a CD in the lab—our studio—at some point and have the first CD recorded with Rydberg atoms," said Holloway—if only as a fun scientific curiosity. But one day, the researcher believes this type of atomic sensing could help improve secure communications. "Atom-based antennas might give us a better way of picking up audio data in the presence of noise, potentially even the very weak signals transmitted in deep space communications," he said.
DOI: AIP Advances, 2019. 10.1063/1.5099036 (About DOIs).
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Saturday June 22 2019, @10:41PM
> That means, in principle, that Rydberg atoms could receive and play back radio signals.
As radio is an EM wave, then they are saying that the atoms are capable of absorbing EM radiation. I wonder what the minimum wavelength is. Small enough that we could absorb higher frequency EM waves, like light or X-rays?
An antenna small enough to efficiently convert light or X rays to electricity would be a revolution in our capacity to generate electricity from solar and nuclear. Currently we can't build antennas small enough to absorb the energy, so we are stuck with relatively low efficiencies in the form of solar cells or steam cycles (for nuclear energy).