Sensitivity comparison of two-photon vs three-photon Rydberg electrometry

We investigate the sensitivity of co-linear three-photon electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in 133Cs Rydberg atoms to radio frequency electric fields and compare against the conventional two-photon system. Specifically, we model the 4-level and 5-level atomic systems and compare how the transmission of the probe changes with different laser powers and RF field strengths. In this model, we define a sensitivity metric that relates to the current best experimental implementation and assumes photon shot noise limited detection. We find that the three-photon system boasts much narrower linewidths compared to the conventional two-photon EIT. These narrow line features, however, do not align with the regions of the best sensitivity. In addition to this, we calculate the expected sensitivity for the two-photon Rydberg sensor and find that the best achievable sensitivity is over an order of magnitude better than the current measured values of 5 μVm−1Hz−1/2. However, by accounting for additional noise sources in the experiment and the quantum efficiency of the photo-detectors, the values are in good agreement.