MEMS vapor cells-based Rydberg-atom electrometry toward miniaturization and high sensitivity

Microsystems & Nanoengineering Ma et al. Microsystems & Nanoengineering (2026)12:227 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41378-026-01216-1 www.nature.com/micronano ARTICLE Open Access MEMS vapor cells-based Rydberg-atom electrometry toward miniaturization and high sensitivity 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; 1234567890():,; Yintao Ma 1,2, Pan Chen1,2, Mingzhi Yu Qijing Lin1,2,4 and Libo Zhao 1,2,4 ✉ 1,2 ✉ , Yao Chen1,2 ✉, Yanbin Wang1,3, Ju Guo1,3, Man Zhao1,2, Ping Yang1,3, Abstract Rydberg-atom electrometry, as an emerging cutting-edge technology, features high sensitivity, broad bandwidth, calibration-free operation, and beyond. However, until now the key atomic vapor cells used for confining electric fieldsensitive Rydberg atoms nearly made with traditional glass-blown techniques, hindering the miniaturization, integration, and batch manufacturing. Here, we present the wafer-level MEMS atomic vapor cells with glass-siliconglass sandwiched structure that are batch-manufactured for both frequency stability and electric field measurement. We use specially customized ultra-thick silicon wafers with a resistivity exceeding 10,000 Ω cm, three orders of magnitude higher than that of typical silicon, and a thickness of 6 mm, providing a 4-fold improvement in optical interrogation length. With the as-developed MEMS atomic vapor cell, we configured a high-sensitivity Rydberg-atom electrometry with the minimal detectable microwave field to be 2.8 mV/cm. This combination of miniaturization and sensitivity represents a significant advance in the state-of-the-art field of Rydberg-atom electrometry, paving the way for chip-scale Rydberg-atom electrometry and potentially opening up new applications in a wider variety of fields. Introduction The detection and sensing of microwave electric fields is of great significance in a variety of fields1–3, including communications, military security, and astronomy. With the revolutionary development of quantum technology, particularly the advent of semiconductor tunable lasers enabling full advantage to be taken of resonance effects, the microwave electric field quantum precision measurement based on Rydberg atoms4–7, regarded as a cutting-edge technology, has come into Correspondence: Mingzhi Yu () or Yao Chen () or Libo Zhao () 1 State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, State IndustryEducation Integration Center for Medical Innovations, International Joint Laboratory for Micro/Nano Manufacturing and Measurement Technologies, Shaanxi Innovation Center for Special Sensing and Testing Technology in Extreme Environments, Shaanxi Provincial University Engineering Research Center for Micro/Nano Acoustic Devices and Intelligent Systems, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China 2 School of Instrument Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article being. Rydberg-atom electrometry with exceptional sensitivity to external electric fields, a property attributed to its large polarizability (~n7, where n is the principal quantum number) and microwave transition dipole moment (~n2), has demonstrated tremendous application potential in terms of precision8, sensitivity9, broadband tunability10,11, and subwavelength resolution spatial electric field imaging12,13. Consequently, the Rydberg-atom electrometry are gradually replacing traditional metal dipole antennas, and it have attracted considerable attention and made leapfrog progress over the past decade or so. The alkali-metal atomic vapor cells, acting as a hermetically sealed transparent container for confining Rydberg atoms, function as the core sensitive component of a Rydberg-atom electrometry. However, almost all atomic vapor cells currently available for Rydberg-atom electrometry are manufactured using traditional glassblown techniques14–17, which severely hinders the performance of this kind of sensor with respect to miniaturization, integration and scalability. © The Author(s) 2026 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Ma et al. Microsystems & Nanoengineering (2026)12:227 Following the general upward trend towards chip-scale integration and batch manufacturing, there is a growing endeavor to confine vapor atoms within well-defined geometries to achieve downscaled, and low-power lightvapor interactions. The quantum sensing technology empowered by Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS) is gradually turning this prospect into reality18–21. The first and most essential phase is the microfabrication of chip-sized alkali-atom vapor cells using the state-of-the-art MEMS technology. Actually, micromachined alkali alkali-metal vapor cells have facilitated the implementation of miniaturized quantum devices22–26, such as chip-scale atomic clocks, gyroscopes and magnetometers, significantly decreasing the size, weight, and power consumption of these quantum devices. Nevertheless, two notable circumstances restrict the miniaturization of the Rydberg atomic system to a considerably lower integration degree than other alkali-metal atom-based quantum sensors. The extremely sensitive Rydberg state demands an ultra-high vacuum vapor cells for preventing spin quantum state decoherence. Additionally, strict restrictions are also imposed on the materials used to fabricate the vapor cells for the purpose of maintaining the fidelity of the microwave fields, thereby preventing distortion phenomena, such as absorption and scattering. Despite existing challenges, there have been preliminary and sporadic attempts to incorporate waferlevel MEMS vapor cells into Rydberg-atom electrometry in recent 2 years27,28. The typical glass-silicon-glass triplelayer stacked structure vapor cells were successfully used for measurement of microwave electric field. However, the limited optical interrogation length and low resistivity defined by silicon wafer result in low sensitivity and accuracy. The all-glass wafer-level vapor cells have also been develop (...truncated)