Surrey, Queen Mary and Southeast University Model a Single-Local-Oscillator Rydberg Receiver for 10 MHz OFDM at 16 GHz, arXiv 2611.06181, 4 November 2026: TRL 2

Qihao Peng, Qu Luo, Maged Elkashlan, Cunhua Pan, Pei Xiao, George K. Karagiannidis, Trung Q. Duong and Jiangzhou Wang posted to arXiv on 4 November 2026 a closed-form, simulation-validated model of a Rydberg atomic receiver that takes in a 10.24 MHz OFDM waveform at 16 GHz with one microwave local oscillator and no frequency comb. The model gives about 11 MHz of usable band on each side of the carrier, a gain-bandwidth tradeoff of roughly 18 dB per doubling, and an atom-aware equalizer that in simulation reaches 2.57 times the data rate of a conventional receiver at 23 dBm. This post reads the paper as dual-use RF spectrum sensing capability in the sensing pillar, explains why a simulated laser-cooled receiver sits at TRL 2, sets it beside the DARPA Quantum Apertures aim, NIST's handheld-radio reception and the Nature Communications frequency-hopping receiver, and lists the hardware build, the thermal-vapor numbers and the outside measurement a spectrum office should wait for.