Weight Hybrid Architecture of Rydberg-Atomic Sensors

Rydberg atomic quantum receivers have been seen as novel radio frequency measurements and the high sensitivity to a large range of frequencies makes it attractive for communications reception. However, their performance can be significantly degraded by hardware-induced noise, particularly the noise from laser, which impacts the overall system noise floor and exhibits correlation. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a weight hybrid (WH) architecture for Rydberg-atomic sensors, a novel four-channel combining scheme designed for atomic sensors operating in correlated noise environments. By jointly processing dual signal channels and dual noise reference channels, the WH architecture effectively mitigates noise contributions from lasers and other hardware components. All channels are optimally combined via maximum likelihood estimation within an expectation maximization framework, enabling robust signal extraction under correlated noise. Moreover, the proposed WH architecture is universal and can be readily extended to other types of Rydberg receivers to achieve consistent performance improvements.