Satellite radio detection via dual-microwave Rydberg spectroscopy

Abstract

Rydberg electric field sensors exploit the large number of Rydberg resonances to provide sensitivity over a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum. However, due to the difficulty of accessing resonant Rydberg states at ultra-high frequency (UHF) and below, ubiquitous bands in the world's current wireless communications infrastructure, they currently fall, short in sensitivity in this range. We present a resonant Rydberg electric field sensor operating in the UHF band using a dual-optical dual-microwave spectroscopy scheme. Adding an additional microwave photon allows us to access transitions between Rydberg states with higher angular momentum (L=3→4), which have lower resonant frequencies than transitions typically used in Rydberg sensors. We discuss the applicability of this type of sensor across the UHF band and below and measure the resonant sensitivity of our system at 2.3 GHz to be 70(5) μV m−1 Hz−1∕2, 57 times better than the measured sensitivity with a far off-resonant probing scheme at this frequency. We also show the effectiveness of this sensing scheme by measuring Sirius XM satellite radio (2.320–2.345 GHz) received outside the laboratory and rebroadcast onto the atoms.