SA-MIMO: Scalable Quantum-Based Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This work addresses the challenge of scalable quantum-based wireless communication using Rydberg atomic receivers. It introduces Phase-Rotated Symbol Spreading (PRSS) within a Scalable Atomic-MIMO (SA-MIMO) framework to convert nonlinear phase retrieval into a linear demultiplexing problem, enabling standard detection techniques and easy extension to multi-carrier systems. The key contributions include the reference-injection concept to improve identifiability, PRSS-based transmitter design, a de-spreading approach yielding a linear model, and comprehensive capacity and complexity analyses, complemented by simulations showing substantial BER gains (up to 2.5 dB with ML detection and over 10 dB with suboptimal detectors) and up to 20 dB improvements for PRSS-assisted atomic OFDM. The results demonstrate that PRSS-assisted SA-MIMO can deliver high sensitivity and interference resilience while maintaining compatibility with conventional FFT-based receivers, indicating strong potential for practical, scalable quantum-based wireless systems.

Abstract

Rydberg atomic receivers offer a quantum-native alternative to conventional RF front-ends by directly detecting electromagnetic fields via highly excited atomic states. While their quantum-limited sensitivity and hardware simplicity make them promising for future wireless systems, extending their use to scalable multi-antenna and multi-carrier configurations, termed Scalable Atomic-MIMO (SA-MIMO), remains largely unexplored. This paper introduces a novel RF transmitter-atomic receiver architecture that addresses this gap. The core idea lies in a novel modulation technique called Phase-Rotated Symbol Spreading (PRSS), which transforms the nonlinear phase retrieval problem inherent to atomic detection into a tractable linear demultiplexing task. PRSS enables efficient signal processing and supports scalable MUX/DeMUX operations in both atomic MIMO and atomic OFDM systems. Simulation results show that the proposed system achieves up to 2.5 dB gain under optimal maximum-likelihood detection and over 10 dB under suboptimal detection in MIMO settings. These results establish PRSS assisted SA-MIMO as a promising architecture for realizing high-sensitivity, interference-resilient atomic wireless communication.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Schematic of a Rydberg atomic receiver based on electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT).
• Figure 2: Performance-complexity trade-off of A-MIMO detection algorithms.
• Figure 3: Schematic of the PRSS-assisted SA-MIMO architecture. This architecture is suitable for both multiuser MIMO and point-to-point MIMO.
• Figure 4: Average BER vs transmit power normalized by noise for small-scale MIMO configurations ($N=2, 4$ and $M=8$) using optimum MLD algorithms.
• Figure 5: Average BER vs normalized transmit power for small-scale MIMO configurations ($N=2, 4$; $M=8$) using suboptimal detection algorithms.