Integrated reconstructive spectrometer with programmable photonic circuits

Chunhui Yao, Kangning Xu, Wanlu Zhang, Minjia Chen, Qixiang Cheng () and Richard Penty
Additional contact information
Chunhui Yao: University of Cambridge
Kangning Xu: GlitterinTech Limited
Wanlu Zhang: University of Cambridge
Minjia Chen: University of Cambridge
Qixiang Cheng: University of Cambridge
Richard Penty: University of Cambridge

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-42197-3

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