Watch NIST’s ‘Atomic Television’ Live and in Color | Hacker News Reader

Watch NIST’s ‘Atomic Television’ Live and in Color

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22 pointsclouddrover6 comments

If you swim through the marketing soup, and the NIST web site, you eventually get to the page about Electric Field Metrology[1], which is what they're really talking about.

Making something relatable to the layman on the street out of this technology is obviously at the limits of marketing and imagination. There's a far more relatable story in there somewhere, but I'm not seeing it right now. Unfortunately, if you can't explain it to the layman, you can't get more funding, which is why they push stories like this, instead of just trusting the institutions to spend research funding wisely.

--- Edit/Append ---

Here you can see a paper from last year[2] where they're hoping to use similar effects as a cheaper way to measure voltages at high precision.

Here's a paper from 2019[3] where they use similar effects to measure RF voltages of ~5 Kv/M in a sub-millimeter gap. It's not very sensitive, in practical terms, but if it can be made linear, it offers a way forward to very accurate measurements of such fields that aren't subject to the vagaries of transistors that drift in parameters over time.

It's the ability to measure things without relying on the manufactured characteristics of a physical object that makes this technology valuable. Just as atomic clocks eliminate the need to trust that a particular Quartz crystal is made precisely enough (and hasn't been damaged or aged too long), or the measurement of length no longer relies on a specific bar stored in a building in France, this technology could offer yet another quantum based method of measurement which depends on the fact that all atoms of a given atom are identical, and thus not subject to that variation.

Currently, there are no quantum based voltage standards that scale well past 10 volts and remain cost effective. This may extend that range to 10kv or beyond.

  1 - https://www.nist.gov/noac/technology/magnetic-and-electric-fields/electric-field-metrology

  2 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.02335.pdf

  3 - https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10108099

Wouln't this approach be useful to miniaturize antennas?

Not really, the sensitivities demonstrated are quite low in terms of what you can pick up with an antenna. Radios that were around in the 1950s routinely pick up 1 microvolt signals, which it turns out is about all you'll ever need. Noise from the environment swamps out any weaker signals.

"Now we are doing video streaming and quantum gaming, streaming video games through the atoms. We basically encoded the video game onto a signal and detected it with the atoms. The output is fed directly into the TV.”

I'm sorry, what? Quantum Gaming? Ridiculous.

You're right to be scornful. They should have included NFTs!

I have difficulties to reconcile "Atom-based communications systems are of practical interest because they could be physically smaller and more tolerant of noisy environments than conventional electronics."

and

"NIST’s receiver uses atoms prepared in high-energy “Rydberg” states, which are unusually sensitive to electromagnetic fields, including radio signals. "

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