Enhancement of electromagnetically induced transparency based Rydberg-atom electrometry through population repumping

We demonstrate improved sensitivity of Rydberg electrometry based on electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) with a ground state repumping laser. Though there are many factors that limit the sensitivity of radio frequency field measurements, we show that repumping can enhance the interaction strength while avoiding additional Doppler or power broadening. Through this method, we nearly double the EIT amplitude without an increase in the width of the peak. A similar increase in amplitude without the repumping field is not possible through simple optimization. We also establish that one of the key limits to detection is the photon shot noise of the probe laser. We show an improvement on the sensitivity of the device by a factor of nearly 2 in the presence of the repump field. Published by AIP Publishing.