Integrated reconstructive spectrometer with programmable photonic circuits

Autor: Chunhui Yao, Kangning Xu, Wanlu Zhang, Minjia Chen, Qixiang Cheng, Richard Penty
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2023
Předmět:
Zdroj: Nature Communications, Vol 14, Iss 1, Pp 1-10 (2023)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2041-1723
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42197-3
Popis: Abstract Optical spectroscopic sensors are a powerful tool to reveal light-matter interactions in many fields. Miniaturizing the currently bulky spectrometers has become imperative for the wide range of applications that demand in situ or even in vitro characterization systems, a field that is growing rapidly. In this paper, we propose a novel integrated reconstructive spectrometer with programmable photonic circuits by simply using a few engineered MZI elements. This design effectively creates an exponentially scalable number of uncorrelated sampling channels over an ultra-broad bandwidth without incurring additional hardware costs, enabling ultra-high resolution down to single-digit picometers. Experimentally, we implement an on-chip spectrometer with a 6-stage cascaded MZI structure and demonstrate 200 nm bandwidth using only 729 sampling channels. This achieves a bandwidth-to-resolution ratio of over 20,000, which is, to our best knowledge, about one order of magnitude greater than any reported miniaturized spectrometers to date.
Databáze: Directory of Open Access Journals