[HN Gopher] New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radi...
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New quantum receiver the first to detect entire radio frequency
spectrum
Author : dnetesn
Score : 91 points
Date : 2021-02-05 11:41 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| secfirstmd wrote:
| The NSA has just entered the room...
| heterodyning wrote:
| Fantastic development.
| baxter001 wrote:
| That opening paragraph is hellishly depressing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Once upon a time the people attracting funding for what became
| the internet were using language just like that. Almost all
| tech has good and bad applications.
| dchichkov wrote:
| In that particular case tax money were used on peer-reviewed
| research. Rather than emitting carbon driving a tank or flying
| yet another airplane. Not that bad.
| madengr wrote:
| https://www.rydbergtechnologies.com/
| danvk wrote:
| Could this be useful for astronomers?
| [deleted]
| JabavuAdams wrote:
| Does anyone have insight into why this is published in the open
| literature, if it is such a militarily-exploitable advance?
| blaeks wrote:
| what if they know/calculate what is implied into
| development/utilization so they know no one but them (or the
| same class opponent) could replicate it
| stevehawk wrote:
| i dont think we have any enemies questioning whether or not we
| listen to radio frequencies?
| mattkrause wrote:
| Yup. The cool thing is that it's an all-in-one system. I'm
| not sure there's a huge strategic advantage in knowing
| whether someone has one mega-radio or a bunch of separate
| modules glued together.
|
| Plus, I linked to the preprint above. It's ten pages long--
| you're not going to be able to build your own based on it;
| it's more just documentation that the thing exists.
| bob1029 wrote:
| What sort of exotic signal processing solution would be required
| to support 20GHz of bandwidth at any useful sampling rate and bit
| depth? How would you actually collect a meaningful amount of
| information from every station in range simultaneously?
|
| I feel like this is something that may be possible in physics,
| but is not well supported in practical applicability. The amount
| of signal processing hardware required to support this in the
| field should be a deal breaker with modern hardware, unless there
| are some really strong constraints regarding the bands &
| modulation schemes actually being monitored simultaneously.
|
| Assume 40GHz sample rate for bare minimum no aliasing over the
| 20GHz spectrum, 8 bits per sample. You will wind up with ~320Gbps
| of data to deal with.
| leeoniya wrote:
| "hold my beer" -- CERN
|
| https://hackaday.com/2020/05/14/crunching-giant-data-from-th...
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Ask Keysight
|
| https://www.keysight.com/en/pdx-2935683-pn-UXR0802A/infiniiu...
|
| That said most signal processing scopes at high frequencies are
| analogue, so you are dealing with Giga Samples / Second not
| bps. But yes to to make sense of the actual data it would
| require some serious networking and storage but that might not
| be necessary for many applications.
| blihp wrote:
| The main application would seem to be no longer needing to scan
| the spectrum for activity... you'd continuously be scanning
| (effectively) all of it simultaneously. A least one useful bit
| information you'd be obtaining from this is simply _where_ in
| the spectrum activity is occurring.
| insert_coin wrote:
| A quantum signal processor of course!
|
| It is however 5-10 years away.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| It seems like lower radio frequencies require really big
| antennas. Does this somehow work around that enabling very
| compact low frequency antennas?
|
| Low frequencies are very useful because they penetrate structures
| more easily.
| [deleted]
| aj7 wrote:
| Miniaturization and ruggedization for practical applications will
| require a lot of work. Not only are the atoms contained in a
| heated tube, but, unlike atomic clocks, sophisticated tunable
| laser technology must also be employed. So only very high value
| missions, like large satellites or ground installations are
| practicable.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is how every tech breakthrough starts. Remember when
| lasers required high vacuum tubes and high voltage power
| supplies with ridiculous specs, serious glass making skills and
| pretty much daily cleaning of all the optics? And now they are
| just about everywhere and cost pennies.
| notum wrote:
| Another StarTrek tech entering the reality realm.
|
| When Voyager stumbled upon a industrial-age civilization Kim
| immediately notified Janeway that he's detecting "Old style" FM
| broadcasts. I recall thinking "why would a 24th century subspace-
| communicator equipped star ship even monitor those?"
|
| I got my answer, quantum receivers, they monitor everything.
| mattkrause wrote:
| Preprint of the paper described in the article:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.14383
| avsteele wrote:
| My company can create some of the highest density cold Rydberg
| (Cs) atom setups in the world. We use our tech for focused ion
| beams, but I'm interested in this application. Our equipment
| isn't 'miniature' but everything is in a single 19" rack.
|
| If anyone who is an expert on the RF side wants to drop ideas
| below or contact me at adam@zerok.com to brainstorm please feel
| free.
| tyler3991 wrote:
| Pretty big win for RF. Peak sensitivity -145 dBm/Hz. Little bit
| of a stretch to say entire RF spectrum, but 0 -> 20 GHz is still
| really cool.
| Animats wrote:
| Right. If it went into the terahertz range, it would help open
| up that area. 5G cell phones go higher than 20GHz than that.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Even so, this is pretty impressive, not all that long ago
| this device would be SF and people would doubt it would ever
| exist.
| Animats wrote:
| Not that long ago, the radios in a cell phone would be SF.
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