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Acta Physica Sinica

Broadband radio frequency signal measurement based on quantum compression sensing

Yanrui Han, Wei Li, Yan-Hua Zang, Changgang Yang, Ruiyun Chen, Guofeng Zhang, Chengbing Qin, Jianyong Hu, Liantuan Xiao

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

With the rapid development of radio frequency technology such as radar, electronic warfare and 5G communication, the measurement and real-time spectrum characterization of broadband radio frequency signals become increasingly important. The traditional radio frequency signal real-time measurement technology is limited by the sampling rate of analog-to-digital converter and the ability to process digital signals, and encounters the problems of narrow measurement band, large data volume, and susceptibility to electromagnetic interference. This work is to study a radio frequency signal measurement technology based on quantum compression sensing, which uses integrated electro-optical crystal as radio frequency sensor, and constructs a compression sensing machine by modulating the photon wave function of the measured radio frequency signal to realize the compression measurement of broadband radio frequency signal, significantly improving the spectrum sensing bandwidth. The experiment demonstrates the long-term spectrum monitoring of power frequency and intermediate frequency high voltage signals, and the real-time spectrum measurement of high frequency radio frequency signals. Under the Fourier limit spectrum resolution, the real-time spectrum analysis bandwidth of GHz magnitude is realized, and the data compression rate reaches 1.7×10–5, which can meet the needs of 5G wireless communication, cognitive radio and other applications for broadband radio frequency signal spectrum measurement, and provide a new technical path for developing the next-generation broadband spectrum sensing technology.

DOI
10.7498/aps.72.20230398

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With the rapid development of radio frequency technology such as radar, electronic warfare and 5G communication, the measurement and real-time spectrum characterization of broadband radio frequency signals become increasingly important. The traditional radio frequency signal real-time measurement technology is limited by the sampling rate of analog-to-digital converter and the ability to process digital signals, and encounters the problems of narrow measurement band, large data volume, and susceptibility to electromagnetic interference. This work is to study a radio frequency signal measurement technology based on quantum compression sensing, which uses integrated electro-optical crystal as radio frequency sensor, and constructs a compression sensing machine by modulating the photon wave function of the measured radio frequency signal to realize the compression measurement of broadband radio frequency signal, significantly improving the spectrum sensing bandwidth. The experiment demonstrates the long-term spectrum monitoring of power frequency and intermediate frequency high voltage signals, and the real-time spectrum measurement of high frequency radio frequency signals. Under the Fourier limit spectrum resolution, the real-time spectrum analysis bandwidth of GHz magnitude is realized, and the data compression rate reaches 1.7×10–5, which can meet the needs of 5G wireless communication, cognitive radio and other applications for broadband radio frequency signal spectrum measurement, and provide a new technical path for developing the next-generation broadband spectrum sensing technology.
Real-time sensing of ultra-wideband radio-frequency signal with high frequency resolution is challenging, which is confined by the sampling rate of electronic analog-to-digital converter and the capability of digital signal processing. By combining quantum mechanics with compressed sensing, quantum compressed sensing is proposed for wideband radio-frequency signal frequency measurement. By using an electro-optical crystal as a sensor which modulates the wave function of the coherent photons with the signal to be measured. The frequency spectrum could be recovered by detecting the modulated sparse photons with a low time-jitter single-photon detector and a time-to-digital converter. More than 50 GHz real-time analysis bandwidth is demonstrated with the Fourier transform limit resolution. The further simulation shows it can be extended to more than 300 GHz with the present technologies.
Wideband frequency-hopping measurement is crucial for the stable operation of frequency-hopping communication systems. Traditional digital signal processing methods based on the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem are limited by bandwidth. Although compressed sensing reduces the sampling rate for analog-to-digital converters, its reliance on high-speed pseudo-random sequences restricts practical applications. In this paper, we propose a wideband frequency-hopping measurement method based on quantum compressed sensing, which enables dynamic capture of wideband frequency-hopping signals. By utilizing coherent state as quantum resources and mapping frequency-hopping signal onto photonic wave functions via an electro-optical modulator, a compressive measurement system is constructed that leverages the inherent randomness of coherent photon measurement collapse, and successfully achieved measurement and reconstruction of a frequency-hopping signal with 5 GHz bandwidth and a hopping rate of 100 kHop/s. A high data compression ratio of 2.1 × 10 3 was attained at a frequency-hopping rate of 1 kHop/s. By integrating time-frequency analysis methods with Bayesian optimization algorithm for frequency-hopping parameter estimation, a time estimation accuracy of 1 μs is achieved. Our research offers what we believe to be a new solution for wideband frequency-hopping measurement and can be extended to various fields such as radar and cognitive radio.
Rydberg-atomic receivers exhibit exceptional sensitivity yet are fundamentally constrained by the narrow instantaneous bandwidth, limiting their practical deployment in broadband scenarios. Prior approaches typically expand the bandwidth by physically broadening the atomic response, which usually requires auxiliary electromagnetic fields or stringent parameter tuning, thereby increasing overall system complexity. Here, we propose a compressive spectral multiplexing framework implemented in a waveguide-coupled Rydberg atomic receiver using a frequency-modulated local oscillator (FMLO). The FMLO creates multiple parallel sensing channels that collectively constitute a physical compressive sensing matrix, generating multiple narrowband intermediate-frequency replicas of the input signal. Thus, a broadband microwave spectrum is projected onto a set of narrowband atomic responses. It is demonstrated that spectral information spanning a bandwidth of over 640 MHz can be effectively compressed into the intrinsic atomic bandwidth of 126 kHz, achieving a spectrum compression ratio exceeding 1000. Furthermore, these output replicas offer intrinsic measurement redundancy and facilitate signal-to-noise ratio enhancement. An approximate 10 dB gain is achieved in the required bit-energy-to-noise-power-density ratio for multi-channel communication via maximal-ratio combining. This approach requires no auxiliary fields or broadband electronics, providing a simple and scalable pathway for chip-scale quantum receivers, latency-critical sensing, and next-generation wireless communications.
The highly-excited Rydberg states are with a unique property of radio-frequency (RF) resonance, and Rydberg atoms at room temperature are promising for developing a broadband RF electric field sensor and relevant metrology standards. In this paper, the working mechanism of an atomic amplitude-modulation(AM) radio receiver is investigated in detail, and various factors affecting the communication quality are discussed. The modulation RF signal can be directly retrieved by measuring the transmission of a probe laser at resonance of rubidium D2 transition using a fast photo-diode detector, without any conventional demodulation process. Various communication experiments are tested at a 10.22 GHz carrier, and a modulation bandwidth of 1 MHz and an acceptable data transfer rate of about 1 Mbps have been achieved using current detection techniques. Owing to a potential high sensitivity and ultra-broadband capability of free-space RF field sensing, the quantum receiver has great significance compared with conventional electronics-based receivers, including but not limited to a weak signal, long-distance, and broadband communication in free space or via a fiber link.
As the main branch of microwave photonics, radio-over-fiber technology provides high bandwidth, low-loss, and long-distance propagation capability, facilitating wide applications ranging from telecommunication to wireless networks. With ultrashort pulses as the optical carrier, a large capacity is further endowed. However, the wide bandwidth of ultrashort pulses results in the severe vulnerability of high-frequency radio frequency (RF) signals to fiber dispersion. With a time-energy entangled biphoton source as the optical carrier combined with the single-photon detection technique, a quantum microwave photonics method in radio-over-fiber systems is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. The results show that it not only realizes unprecedented nonlocal RF signal modulation with strong resistance to the dispersion but also provides an alternative mechanism to distill the RF signal out from the dispersion effectively. Furthermore, the spurious-free dynamic ranges of the nonlocally modulated and distilled RF signals have been significantly improved. With the ultra-weak detection and the high-speed processing advantages endowed by the low-timing-jitter single-photon detection, the quantum microwave photonics method opens new possibilities in modern communication and networks.
Up to now, the measurement of radio-frequency (RF) electric field achieved using the electromagnetically-induced transparency (EIT) of Rydberg atoms has proved to be of high-sensitivity and shows a potential to produce a promising atomic RF receiver at resonance between two chosen Rydberg states. In this paper, we study the extension of the feasibility of digital communication via this quantum-based antenna over a continuously tunable RF-carrier at off-resonance. Our experiment shows that the digital communication at a rate of 500 kbps can be performed reliably within a tunable bandwidth of 200 MHz near a 10.22 GHz carrier. Outside of this range, the bit error rate (BER) increases, rising to, for example, 15% at an RF-detuning of ±150 MHz. In the measurement, the time-varying RF field is retrieved by detecting the optical power of the probe laser at the center frequency of RF-induced symmetric or asymmetric Autler-Townes splitting in EIT. Prior to the digital test, we studied the RF-reception quality as a function of various parameters including the RF detuning and found that a choice of linear gain response to the RF-amplitude can suppress the signal distortion. The modulating signal can be decoded at speeds up to 500 kHz in the tunable bandwidth. Our test consolidates the physical basis for reliable communication and spectral sensing over a wider broadband RF-carrier, which paves a way for the concurrent multi-channel communications founded on the same pair of Rydberg states.