Continuous Quantum Aperture: Beamforming with a Single-Vapor-Cell Rydberg Receiver

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 10 Apr 2026] Continuous Quantum Aperture: Beamforming with a Single-Vapor-Cell Rydberg Receiver Mingyao Cui, Qunsong Zeng, Minze Chen, Yilin Wang, Zhiao Zhu, Tianqi Mao, Dezhi Zheng, Kaibin Huang, Jun Zhang Beamforming is conventionally understood as a collective property of many discrete antenna elements in both communication and radar fields, which links angular selectivity to array size, element spacing, and band-specific hardware. Here we uncover a fundamentally different beamforming mechanism achieved by a Rydberg atomic receiver: a Rydberg-atom vapor cell dressed by a local-oscillator field constitutes a continuous quantum aperture. In this regime, spatially-varying quantum coherence across the aperture provides continuous amplitude-phase control, allowing a directional beam pattern to emerge from one sensing volume rather than from an engineered array. We establish the theory of continuous quantum aperture and show that tailoring the local-oscillator field can directly program the aperture response. This enables reconfigurable single-peak, multipeak, and multiband beamforming within a single vapor cell. Experiments on a Rydberg atomic receiver prototype verify that practical beam patterns agree with theoretical predictions across aperture sizes, frequency bands, and local-oscillator configurations. Leveraging this new beamforming mechanism, we further demonstrate interference mitigation, multiuser access, and multiband multiuser access with the single-vapor-cell platform. Our results identify the continuous quantum aperture as a new operating principle of Rydberg atomic receivers and establish single-vapor-cell beamforming as an integrated and reconfigurable platform for spatially selective electromagnetic reception. Comments: This paper introduces the concept of continuous quantum aperture, in which a continuous atomic medium (a single Rydberg-atom vapor cell) performs efficient and reconfigurable beamforming Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2604.09068 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.09068v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.09068 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Mingyao Cui [view email] [v1] Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:50:23 UTC (17,977 KB) Access Paper: view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)