We report several technical approaches that significantly improve the performance of a vapor-cell atomic electrometer operating in the quasi-dc frequency domain ($\ll 1\mathrm{kHz}$). With a very small active volume of approximately $11{\text{mm}}^3$ inside a $2\times 2\times 2{\text{cm}}^3$ vapor cell, we demonstrated a noise floor for electric field (E-field) sensitivity ranging from $0.2\mathrm{to}7.7(\mathrm{mV}/\mathrm{m})/\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}$ for a frequency band of 1–100 Hz. Our work utilizes only a bare vapor cell for electrometry, without any metal parts or electrodes, to ensure minimal distortion of the measured E-field and to minimize the effective sensing volume for high spatial resolution. The E-field-sensitive atomic state (Rydberg state) is excited and read out optically, maximizing the simplicity of the system design and enabling the miniaturization of quasi-dc E-field sensors for potential applications, such as diagnostics of electronics without physical contact, communications in and below the super-low frequency (SLF) band, proximity detection, remote activity surveillance, tracing charge signatures, and research in bioscience and geoscience.

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• Adsorption
• Atomic & molecular processes in external fields
• Electric field effects
• Metrology
• Quantum sensing
• Alkali metals
• Atomic gases
• Rydberg atoms & molecules