New Quantum Antenna Reveals a Hidden Terahertz World

Posted18 days agoActive14 days ago

aacker

124 points

8 comments

sciencedaily.comNewsstory

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Quantum TechnologyTerahertz RadiationScience

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Terahertz Radiation

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Discussion (8 comments)

Showing 10 comments

germandiago

14 days ago

2 replies

Could anyone knowledgeable about waves and physics related to it shed some light into possible practical implications?

imglorp

14 days ago

There are natural astronomical sources, from blackbody radiation. It doesn't penetrate the atomosphere so space based observations only.

TFA mentions spectroscopy and non-destructive scanning instead of X-rays.

adrian_b

14 days ago

This just provides the means for accurately measuring frequencies in the THz range.

This is important because previously it was possible to measure accurately either lower frequencies, until a few hundred GHz, or higher frequencies, from infrared to ultraviolet, i.e. from tens of THz to hundreds of THz.

Measuring accurately frequencies allows accurate spectroscopy in this frequency range, which can provide information about the chemical composition of materials.

superkuh

14 days ago

2 replies

Rydberg atoms aren't antennas. When modulated and then read out by the electrical field of a laser they can be used to infer the ambient electrical field at a arbitrary frequency over very, very narrow frequency bandwidths. This can be used to receive radio signals. But it's not very good at it and it's not an antenna. While the specific frequency can be tuned over a very large range the instantaneous bandwidth is still too narrow to actually receive anything but narrowband carrier (no modulation wings) and barely that.

These are physics tools for specific things, not general radio receivers for transmitted information.

parineum

14 days ago

2 replies

What's an antenna if not something that can receive radio signals?

hulitu

14 days ago

1 reply

> What's an antenna if not something that can receive radio signals?

>> the instantaneous bandwidth is still too narrow to actually receive anything but narrowband carrier

so it is a "useless" antenna.

mycall

14 days ago

Could it pick up a THz chirp signal?

estimator7292

14 days ago

The same way an LED is not a solar panel. It will give you some voltage, but basically a rounding error above zero.

Antenna are about capturing energy over macro scale areas. This atom is measuring electromagnetic oscillation at a particular point in space. Technically you can recover a signal, but only a rounding error above the noise floor. It doesn't capture energy.

greenbit

14 days ago

Yes, what is really needed is a way to baseband a good swath of spectrum, e.g. in the neighborhood of 100MHz to 10GHz, so that conventional electronics can be used to study something more than simple low rate there/not-there activity. And conversely a way to modulate similar bandwidth onto arbitrary frequencies up in the THz region.

vixen99

14 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_comb

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