Aircraft-level vibration effects on hyperfine laser locks for Rydberg electric-field sensing

We present a subsystem-isolated study of aircraft-level vibration coupling to a hyperfine laser lock and its propagation to a two-photon Rydberg superheterodyne RF sensor. Here, the probe laser is stabilized to an atomic hyperfine transition, and RF electric fields are detected via a Rydberg-atom superheterodyne process that down-converts the signal to an optical readout. A compact Doppler-free saturated-absorption spectroscopy (SAS) module probing the 87 Rb 5 S 1/2 →5 P 3/2 hyperfine manifold was driven to NASA DC-8 in-flight vibration levels (10 3 transferred vibration noise to the servo, elevating low-frequency noise in the atomic RF spectrum, but with no measurable degradation of the RF sensing at 100 kHz detuning.