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Get Ready For Atomic Radio (technologyreview.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: David Anderson at Rydberg Technologies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and a couple of colleagues, have reinvented the antenna from scratch. Their new device works in an entirely different way from conventional antennas, using a laser to measure the way radio signals interact with certain types of atoms. The secret sauce in the new device is Rydberg atoms. These are cesium atoms in which the outer electrons are so excited that they orbit the nucleus at great distance. At these distances, the electrons' potential energy levels are extremely closely spaced, and this gives them special properties. Indeed, any small electric field can nudge them from one level to another. Radio waves consist of alternating electric fields that readily interact with any Rydberg atoms they come across. This makes them potential sensors.
But how to detect this interaction? A gas made of Rydberg atoms has another property that turns out to be useful -- it can be made transparent by a laser tuned to a specific frequency. This laser essentially saturates the gas's ability to absorb light, allowing another laser beam to pass through it. However, the critical frequency at which this happens depends crucially on the properties of the Rydberg atoms in the gas. When these atoms interact with radio waves, the critical frequency changes in response. That's the basis of the radio detection. Anderson and co create a gas of cesium atoms excited into Rydberg states. They then use a laser tuned to a specific frequency to make the gas transparent. Finally, they shine a second laser through the gas and measure how much light is absorbed, to see how the transparency varies with ambient radio waves. The signal from a simple light-sensitive photodiode then reveals the way the radio signals are frequency modulated or amplitude modulated. The atomic radio can detect a huge range of signals -- over four octaves from the C band to the Q band, or wavelengths from 2.5 to 15 centimeters. It also should be less insensitive to electromagnetic interference due to its lack of conventional radio circuitry. "The atomic radio wave receiver operates by direct real-time optical detection of the atomic response to AM and FM baseband signals, precluding the need for traditional de-modulation and signal-conditioning electronics," say Anderson and co.
But how to detect this interaction? A gas made of Rydberg atoms has another property that turns out to be useful -- it can be made transparent by a laser tuned to a specific frequency. This laser essentially saturates the gas's ability to absorb light, allowing another laser beam to pass through it. However, the critical frequency at which this happens depends crucially on the properties of the Rydberg atoms in the gas. When these atoms interact with radio waves, the critical frequency changes in response. That's the basis of the radio detection. Anderson and co create a gas of cesium atoms excited into Rydberg states. They then use a laser tuned to a specific frequency to make the gas transparent. Finally, they shine a second laser through the gas and measure how much light is absorbed, to see how the transparency varies with ambient radio waves. The signal from a simple light-sensitive photodiode then reveals the way the radio signals are frequency modulated or amplitude modulated. The atomic radio can detect a huge range of signals -- over four octaves from the C band to the Q band, or wavelengths from 2.5 to 15 centimeters. It also should be less insensitive to electromagnetic interference due to its lack of conventional radio circuitry. "The atomic radio wave receiver operates by direct real-time optical detection of the atomic response to AM and FM baseband signals, precluding the need for traditional de-modulation and signal-conditioning electronics," say Anderson and co.
Huh?
That should be "more or less insensitive", not "more insensitive".
Have you read my blog lately?
Only requires 2 lasers, highly radioactive turned into a gas and energized into a highly excited state.
I see no problems with any of those things in a commercial device.
Why is this better than current radio?
Coming next week on another exiting episode of Slashdot: Why, oh, Why?!
As nefarious moderators continue to construct their secret atomic blast-o-beam that can use normal radio waves to manipulate the molecular structures of some elements, CmdrTaco realizes that the penile implants of the new Slashdot administrators are sensitive to such frequencies. In a daring mission he and RobMalda engineer a daring plan to hijack a radio telescope array. Will their intrepid plan to demolecularize what microscopic residue the administrators consider to be their testicles to work?
I mean really that's about the equivalent of turning an electron gas into your antenna. Still will need signal conditioning and demodulation though unless it's very linear.
reinvented the antenna from scratch
The battery was reinvented, due to it's first development, in what is now modern day Iran, being lost over time. The antenna, however, has not been forgotten so could not have been "reinvented". Redesigned, perhaps, or a new type of antenna may have been invented, but the antenna on my roof is still there, and is still a variation of the first dipole antenna invented by Heinrich Hertz. This seems to be a variation of the phased array, just on a molecular scale, who's development has been filtered through the marketing department.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Nobody has cared about radio for 15 years. Inventing a new form of radio is interesting but pointless.
So you don't use a smartphone or a wireless router, or any form of wireless transmission? You don't care because radio is everywhere.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
actual news for nerds!
Holy fuck, really?
Less insensitive means "more sensitive", idiots.
Pssst! Don't tell anyone, but Radio is code word for "conservative talk radio". Only conservatives spies get there marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. At any moment, they're ready to act on a coordinated attack against gays and hipsters. A Pearl Harbor event were they take San Francisco.
Radio, ATOMIC Radio... be afraid! Be very very afraid for now the voices are to be heard much clearer now.
Life is not for the lazy.
Should be the Zoidberg atoms, not the Rydberg atoms...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's not a new form of radio, it is a new form of radio receiver.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Clearchannel (oops, iheart) sprays shit over 4 octaves of spectrum, instead of just the FM band.
Forgive me for preferring my CDs and USB device over your "radio".
Read the article a few times. This is pretty amazing stuff. Truly ingenious way of looking at the task
The bottleneck for two-way communication is generally the return channel of the mobile device. Is this going to help with efficiency at that end, or is this inherently a one-way process? It would seem to me that the process inherently includes an opto-isolator, which makes the process irreversible. It will still help by pushing the noise floor down on the receive end, but if we're still stuck with the same old transmit antennas we have now, this design isn't going to make phones any smaller since it can't replace the existing antenna(s).
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
very cool idea.
nowhere even remotely as good as a modern receiver IC.
but very cool idea.
Absolute statements are never true
I think I just had a StarTrek moment here. The concept is simple and elegant (obviously practical aspects aren't quite as simple but certainly far from undoable) A combination of shit we already knew and already had to do something nobody thought of yet.
I may be in love here to a degree that I wont even ask for when we can expect this to be commercially available ;).
I stopped listening to Radio1 when Chris Moyles left the breakfast show anyway.
>/dev/null 2>&1
What gets me most excited about this is that the receiving element is tiny- if they can also be made dense- and it looks like there are elements that can be shared among multiple receivers to increase density. A dense set of antennas allows for very directional beamforming, and IIRC, this is a sufficient way to have an extremely accurate directional receiver. The Coherence of the laser should even help with that. Their photodiode as a demodulator is primitive, but a start.
And here I thought cars were the only things that blew up in the wasteland! Now I can throw atomic radios like hand grenades at those pesky Deathclaws!
Will it fit in your pocket?
Your living room?
Your warehouse?
Don't know if carrying a cesium cell phone in my pocket would be a good idea.
It's truly a remarkable invention, everything relies on wireless transmission nowadays. From this brief description it suggests that this new antenna is not only very wide band but also very sensitive (not to mention the size). I hope it will get into market soon, it will revolutionize communication not only on Earth but also between satellites. I also wonder an impact on radio astronomy, instead of huge heavy collector dishes one might imagine a field of these sensors (depending on its price and sensitivity though).
Thanks for this info.
BTW, sadly, some comments suggest that the /. is not so geeky anymore.
What is the sensitivity and latency using this method? Since it occurs at the atomic scale can we assume that the chance of getting real data throughput in the FM band quite good?
What will be the impact on transmission power requirements given this heightened sensitivity? Will low power devices be as clear-reception as the type of power transmission hitting the airwaves when you tune into a radio station?
The biggest downfall to 2.4ghz and 5.8ghz (aside from crowding and cross-talk interference) is the line-of-sight and near-line-of-sight requirements to travel more than a few miles. With lower frequencies and longer wavelengths, line of sight would become less required, especially if the sensitivity is as heightened as they are making it sound. 900mhz worked better from a wireless-internet perspective, but the throughput was shit. I am assuming that the closer to quantum scale you get, the quicker the response times and lower the latency. Unfortunately 900mhz fell outside the 15cm range but maybe they can find a similar method that worked even at 33cm wavelengths.
This is huge from a free (as in speech) internet perspective. Back in the 90s when we first got into the internet business, the only people offering service were local companies akin to small-town cable companies who bought a franchise license. Unlike cable, you could have 3 and 4 providers in a town. Since the PSTN was already in place and in use to provide service, you had your choice of which providers you used for dialup services. As broadband came to market these small providers worked with the telco's to resell ADSL the phone companies provided where the layer2 gets tunneled back to a specific provider. Not quite as equal but still gave the consumer some alternative options. Shortly after the patriot act and the verizon ruling of not having to let competitors on your network, things devolved into two monopolies, the telco's and the cable companies. Nearly gone is the cottage industry of providing internet access. Wireless is the only real frontier left, but its limitations have hindered it considerably. Trees are a problem, other buildings are a problem, cross-talk is a problem. Attenuation and line-of-sight are creating a lot of difficulties in back-hauling information. Even within a given radius, using google earth to qualify a potential customer, onsite surveys still sometimes return failed test results. If we can open the frontier of wireless communication to where anyone could successfully go into business selling access wirelessly, we can put an end to these monopolies in a pure market-driven, non-legislated manner. We wouldn't have to fret Net Neutrality oversight. With 10 - 15 different providers in your town, that are just as easy to switch to as picking a different SSID and calling them up to start billing, the power the telco's would wield by trying to collude with each other to restrict your access, diminishes greatly. It was never the tier1 carrier availability that eroded your options, it was always the last-mile connection that was/is the problem.
Pssst! Don't tell anyone, but Radio is code word for "conservative talk radio". Only conservatives spies get there marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. At any moment, they're ready to act on a coordinated attack against gays and hipsters. A Pearl Harbor event were they take San Francisco.
Radio, ATOMIC Radio... be afraid! Be very very afraid for now the voices are to be heard much clearer now.
You know - I think you're right about what a lot of people think. They hear the word radio, and they think of the dying AM radio world.
I remember when Hams with their Handi-talkies were looked upon as nerds. Now people are hopelessly addicted to their smartphones, but they are somehow cool. Either way, those little devices are two way radios.
I'm at breakfast now, connected to the restaurant's router with the radio in my laptop. Looking at the local mountains with all of their towers.
For all of the AC's that think radio is dead, here's a cool little chart of frequency allocations in the USA https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files... I have a huge poster of this in my office to illustrate just how crowded the bands are. When someone gets spunky about "just find a space!" I tell them to go over to the chart and find the space to use. To make matters worse, even if AM radio dies off, those Medium frequencies are just too unruly for the kind of radio communications people envision today. So might as well allocate the whole band to Amateur radio for Hams to experiment with.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
If it takes more money to build than a simple crystal radio or doesn't have the battery life of one, or otherwise cant prove itself as something worth the extra expense and cost, it will never be trusted or used.
So what is the actual benefit of this?
Increasing the sensitivity of the receiving antenna decreases the power requirement on the transmitter. Mobile phones have less of a problem receiving a signal from the tower than the tower does receiving from the mobile. Since the towers already report back the strength of the signal received, and the mobiles adjust power output as needed, a more sensitive antenna at the tower could have a positive effect on mobile phone use with no changes needed at the mobile. Saying that a new receiving antenna is useless for transmitting ignores the fact that transmitters and receivers are part of a system and improvements in the performance of one can result in improvements in the overall system.
What a f***cking complicated way to listen to your favorite FM station.
the next fallout will perhaps include even more atomic radio
the potential upside is that you dont have to get brain cancer by transmitting from your cell phone in order to be picked up by the tower. Lower transmission power should be able to be 'heard' using this technology. This directly translates to better signal quality, less interference, and lower battery consumption. The LTE antenna is the biggest battery drain on your phone right after the active display. Along side these is the wi-fi antenna on your phone. So the upsides are:
better coverage and lower power transmission for cellular data
better coverage for wi-fi hotspots, less dead spots, perhaps 600ft+ radius
lower power consumption on portable devices.
the next fallout will perhaps include even more atomic radio
If we do ever decide it's time to play with our nucs, radio communications will be pretty dicey for quite a while. Those EMP pulses are going to shut down a lot of communications. Might be some Ionosphere disruptions as well.
A lot of Emergency communicators store their equipment in Faraday cages for just that reason. I have some radios stored in ammo boxes to protect against EMP. A direct strike obviously won't matter as we turning into overcooked toast or die of radiation poisoning.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Cool and exciting discovery which may impact a lot of things. But 2.5-15 cm is 2-12 GHz, not very useful for long-range omni-directional terrestrial radio transmissions. However, I can imagine this might make a big impact on the design and usefulness of X band satellite receivers. Maybe it will improve WiFi receivers as well. Sounds like it might be possible to make it work just as well in any orientation. How about in a rapidly spinning device?
precisely! btw - how many radios in a typical smartphone? 5-6 or more - gps, nfc, cmda/gsm, wifi, bluetooth, hsda, etc., etc.
nothing to see here - move along
...making your iPhone 15 even smaller (15 to give it a chance to come into production by then)
nothing to see here - move along
Nobody has cared about radio for 15 years. Inventing a new form of radio is interesting but pointless.
I still listen to the radio! Now get off my lawn! Damn kids!
Does this mean my cellphone will receive a signal indoors where it does not do so now?