A self-locking Rydberg atom electric field sensor

Abstract

A crucial step toward 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 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.