Precise measurement of electric fields at giga- to terahertz frequencies is important for emerging technologies, such as generating single photons and building quantum logic gates and advanced sensors. The authors have developed an absolute rf electric-field sensor based on Rydberg atoms, in which each gaseous alkali-metal atom acts as a detector. This study provides crucial information about how the geometry of the container affects such measurements, and the work is poised to impact applications as diverse as atomic clocks, vapor-cell magnetometers, remote sensing, antenna calibration, and metamaterials characterization.
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Fan et al. (2015) studied this question.