Continuous Quantum Aperture: Beamforming with a Single-Vapor-Cell Rydberg Receiver
Abstract
Beamforming is conventionally understood as a collective property of many discrete antenna elements in both communication and radar fields, which links angular selectivity to array size, element spacing, and band-specific hardware. Here we uncover a fundamentally different beamforming mechanism achieved by a Rydberg atomic receiver: a Rydberg-atom vapor cell dressed by a local-oscillator field constitutes a continuous quantum aperture. In this regime, spatially-varying quantum coherence across the aperture provides continuous amplitude-phase control, allowing a directional beam pattern to emerge from one sensing volume rather than from an engineered array. We establish the theory of continuous quantum aperture and show that tailoring the local-oscillator field can directly program the aperture response. This enables reconfigurable single-peak, multipeak, and multiband beamforming within a single vapor cell. Experiments on a Rydberg atomic receiver prototype verify that practical beam patterns agree with theoretical predictions across aperture sizes, frequency bands, and local-oscillator configurations. Leveraging this new beamforming mechanism, we further demonstrate interference mitigation, multiuser access, and multiband multiuser access with the single-vapor-cell platform. Our results identify the continuous quantum aperture as a new operating principle of Rydberg atomic receivers and establish single-vapor-cell beamforming as an integrated and reconfigurable platform for spatially selective electromagnetic reception.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.09068,
title = {Continuous Quantum Aperture: Beamforming with a Single-Vapor-Cell Rydberg Receiver},
author = {Mingyao Cui and Qunsong Zeng and Minze Chen and Yilin Wang and Zhiao Zhu and Tianqi Mao and Dezhi Zheng and Kaibin Huang and Jun Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.09068},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
This paper introduces the concept of continuous quantum aperture, in which a continuous atomic medium (a single Rydberg-atom vapor cell) performs efficient and reconfigurable beamforming