Rydberg atomic (RA) receivers represent a revolutionary quantum technology for wireless communications, offering unprecedented sensitivity beyond conventional radio frequency (RF) antennas. However, these receivers detect only signal amplitude, losing critical phase information. While reference signals generated by a local oscillator (LO) can assist in phase recovery, existing modulation schemes designed for conventional systems perform poorly with this quantum detection mechanism. This paper introduces a breakthrough LO-aware adaptive modulation (LOAM) scheme specifically developed for RA receivers that dynamically adapts to complex fading channel coefficients. LOAM maximizes the minimum amplitude difference between constellation points, ensuring optimal detection performance. The innovation employs an adaptive co-linear constellation architecture aligned with the combined phase of reference signal and channel coefficient. For strong reference signals, LOAM generates symmetric constellation points centered at origin; for weak signals, it adopts non-symmetric distributions. The paper mathematically derives the threshold governing these operational regimes. Simulation results reveal the transformative impact of LOAM, demonstrating performance gains exceeding 45 dB over conventional modulation schemes, including quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), phase-shift keying (PSK), and pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM).
Rydberg atomic (RA) receivers represent a revolutionary quantum technology for wireless communications, offering unprecedented sensitivity beyond conventional radio frequency (RF) antennas. However, these receivers detect only signal amplitude, losing critical phase information. While reference signals generated by a local oscillator (LO) can assist in phase recovery, existing modulation schemes designed for conventional systems perform poorly with this quantum detection mechanism. This paper introduces a breakthrough LO-aware adaptive modulation (LOAM) scheme specifically developed for RA receivers that dynamically adapts to complex fading channel coefficients. LOAM maximizes the minimum amplitude difference between constellation points, ensuring optimal detection performance. The innovation employs an adaptive co-linear constellation architecture aligned with the combined phase of reference signal and channel coefficient. For strong reference signals, LOAM generates symmetric constellation points centered at origin; for weak signals, it adopts non-symmetric distributions. The paper mathematically derives the threshold governing these operational regimes. Simulation results reveal the transformative impact of LOAM, demonstrating performance gains exceeding 45 dB over conventional modulation schemes, including quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), phase-shift keying (PSK), and pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM).
The intrinsic integration of Rydberg atomic receivers into wireless communication systems is proposed, by harnessing the principles of quantum physics in wireless communications. More particularly, we conceive a pair of Rydberg atomic receivers, one incorporates a local oscillator (LO), referred to as an LO-dressed receiver, while the other operates without an LO and is termed an LO-free receiver. The appropriate wireless model is developed for each configuration, elaborating on the receiver's responses to the radio frequency (RF) signal, on the potential noise sources, and on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) performance. The developed wireless model conforms to the classical RF framework, facilitating compatibility with established signal processing methodologies. Next, we investigate the associated distortion effects that might occur, specifically identifying the conditions under which distortion arises and demonstrating the boundaries of linear dynamic ranges. This provides critical insights into its practical implementations in wireless systems. Finally, extensive simulation results are provided for characterizing the performance of wireless systems, harnessing this pair of Rydberg atomic receivers. Our results demonstrate that LO-dressed systems achieve a significant SNR gain of approximately 40~50 dB over conventional RF receivers in the standard quantum limit regime. This SNR head-room translates into reduced symbol error rates, enabling efficient and reliable transmission with higher-order constellations.
Rydberg atomic receiver has emerged as promising candidate for next-generation wireless communication, due to the exceptional sensitivity and ability to overcome the physical limitations of traditional radio frequency antennas. Utilizing the resonant response of atomic energy levels for signal detection, Rydberg atomic receiver is inherently confined to a narrow instantaneous bandwidth. However, in high-mobility scenarios such as satellite communications, the severe Doppler effect induces carrier frequency offsets, which drive the signal beyond the instantaneous bandwidth and result in severe distortion. In this paper, we propose an adaptive local oscillator (LO) tracking Rydberg atomic receiver architecture designed to lock high-dynamic signals within the effective atomic response bandwidth. By employing a cross-product automatic frequency control (CPAFC) algorithm, the system dynamically estimates the instantaneous frequency offset, generates a corresponding error control signal, and adjusts the LO frequency through a feedback loop. Consequently, the intermediate frequency signal can always be locked close to the center of the atomic response bandwidth regardless of dynamics. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture significantly outperforms existing Rydberg atomic receiver, effectively alleviating performance degradation in high-dynamic environments.
Facing the trend of 5G/6G communications toward high spectral efficiency and low power consumption, RF receivers urgently need to overcome the triple challenges of high sensitivity, terahertz (THz) coverage, and system integration. Conventional approaches are limited by electronic thermal noise, band correlation and antenna perturbation effects. In this context, sensors based on the Rydberg atom become a promising alternative, with his large electric dipole moment bringing extremely high sensitivity, inherent frequency selectivity, and the potential to build low-power integrated photonic platforms. This paper describes a Rydberg atomic RF sensor using a quantum coherent mechanism to receive and demodulate quadrature AM signals. The core innovations include: (1) a scheme for 4QAM signal splitting and demodulation within the atomic resonance region via precise signal control; and (2) dynamic, real-time control of the demodulation channels (I/Q paths) by exploiting the phase difference between the local oscillator (LO) and signal (SIG) fields. The proposed architecture can support demodulation of quadrature AM signals, demonstrating its great potential as a versatile next-generation communications platform.
Rydberg-atom quantum receivers (RAQRs) offer highly sensitive RF reception, but their communication performance depends jointly on atomic response, optical transduction, receiver noise, bandwidth, and wireless-channel conditions. This paper develops a BER-aware communication-theoretic framework for superheterodyne RAQR-assisted wireless communication, linking four-level Rydberg-atom dynamics and coherent optical detection to multipath propagation and digital communication performance. Closed-form instantaneous and average SNR and BER expressions are derived for square Gray-coded M-QAM over correlated Rayleigh fading. The RAQR operating point is then jointly optimized over atomic, optical, RF, and geometric parameters using analytical block-wise updates within a fixed-point procedure subject to physical and bandwidth constraints. Numerical results demonstrate substantial gains in low-power reception, bandwidth utilization, robustness to detuning, fading and delay spread, outage, and communication coverage compared with conventional, advanced, and fixed-point RAQR receivers. The results demonstrate that BER-aware joint optimization translates the intrinsic sensitivity of Rydberg-atom sensing into tangible communication-level gains.
Rydberg atomic receivers offer a quantum-native alternative to conventional RF front-ends by directly detecting electromagnetic fields via highly excited atomic states. While their quantum-limited sensitivity and hardware simplicity make them promising for future wireless systems, extending their use to scalable multi-antenna and multi-carrier configurations, termed Scalable Atomic-MIMO (SA-MIMO), remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a novel RF transmitter-atomic receiver architecture that addresses this gap. The core idea lies in a novel modulation technique called Phase-Rotated Symbol Spreading (PRSS), which transforms the nonlinear phase retrieval problem inherent to atomic detection into a tractable linear demultiplexing task. PRSS enables efficient signal processing and supports scalable MUX/DeMUX operations in atomic MIMO systems. Simulation results show that the proposed system achieves up to 2.5 dB gain under optimal maximum-likelihood detection and over 10 dB under suboptimal detection in MIMO settings. These results establish PRSS-assisted SA-MIMO as a promising architecture for realizing high-sensitivity, interference-resilient atomic wireless communication.
Rydberg atomic quantum receivers (RAQR) exhibit exceptional sensitivity to radio-frequency (RF) signals, positioning them as promising candidates for next-generation wireless systems. Extending their capabilities to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), however, requires atomic responses that go beyond broadband reception and are tailored to the structured interference of multicarrier signals. To bridge this gap, we develop an atomic-comb Rydberg receiver based on six-wave mixing (SWM) transduction. In particular, injecting a multi-tone local oscillator (LO) into the RAQR generates frequency-shifted replicas of the intrinsic SWM response. By subtly tuning the amplitude and phase of each LO tone, constructive and destructive interference can be selectively induced to preserve desired response components while attenuating harmful frequency offsets. Furthermore, we harness the response-reshaping capability of the proposed atomic comb to proactively mitigate OFDM interference. More explicitly, by exploiting the discrete difference-frequency structure of both carrier-frequency-offset (CFO)-induced and phase-noise (PN)-induced inter-carrier interference (ICI), we optimize the atomic-comb response to suppress dominant ICI components directly. We further reveal an intrinsic coupling between spectral shaping and the time-domain effective channel memory, motivating a joint optimization of both ICI and inter-symbol interference (ISI), which simultaneously suppresses inter-carrier leakage and post-cyclic-prefix (CP) tail energy. Extensive simulation results validate our atomic-comb design, unveiling that the proposed atomic comb can effectively reshape the receiver response over the OFDM, while mitigating ICI, shortening the effective channel memory, and substantially lowering CP overhead.