image: Figure 1. Configurations of the on-chip spectrometer and the principle. view more
Credit: OEA
A new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances; DOI 10.29026/oea.2022.210100 considers ultrahigh-resolution on-chip spectrometer with silicon photonic resonators.
Spectrometer is one of the most popular instruments for spectral analysis, and has been used in the fields of biosensor, food safety, drug detection, clinical diagnosis, and environmental monitoring. Traditional spectrometers usually are large and expensive, limiting the application scenario greatly. The volume miniaturization and the system integration has been well recognized for spectrometers as a trend. On-chip spectrometers have unique advantages in size, weight, power consumption and cost. It is still very challenging to realize on-chip spectrometers with ultra-high resolution for the applications in many fields such as smart phones, atmospheric monitoring, and Aerospace Exploration.
The authors of this article propose a silicon-based high-performance on-chip spectrometer with an ultra-compact size and an ultra-high resolution. In particular, the configuration consists of an ultra-narrow-band filter and wideband filters array was introduced.
The ultra-high-Q resonator was realized with Euler-bends, enabling ultra-high-resolution wavelength-selective filtering. Meanwhile, the wideband filter array was used to achieve an extended working window for the on-chip spectrometer. The demonstrated on-chip spectrometer has a footprint as compact as 0.35 mm2 and a resolution as high as 0.005 nm (which is the highest for on-chip dispersive spectrometers). The working window is about 10 nm and the ratio between the working window and the resolution is up to ~2000, which is the record for spectrometers with a footprint less than 1 mm2. The proposed spectrometer breaks the bottleneck of insufficient resolution of the dispersive chip-level spectrometer. It is expected that the present ultrahigh-resolution on-chip spectrometer plays an important role in environmental monitoring, aerospace and many other fields, especially in the field of spectral analyzing in smart phones.
Article reference: Zhang L, Zhang M, Chen TN, Liu DJ, Hong SH et al. Ultrahigh-resolution on-chip spectrometer with silicon photonic resonators. Opto-Electron Adv 5, 210100 (2022). doi: 10.29026/oea.2022.210100
Keywords: integrated photonics / silicon / spectrometer / resonator
# # # # # #
The silicon integrated nanophotonics group (SING) of Zhejiang University is led by Prof. Daoxin Dai and has been working in the field of silicon photonics, aiming to achieve high-performance and highly-density photonic integrated devices and chips for optical communications, optical interconnects, optical sensing and optical computing. The group has published more than 300 papers in Nature and other top journals.
# # # # # #
Opto-Electronic Advances (OEA) is a high-impact, open access, peer reviewed monthly SCI journal with an impact factor of 8.933 (Journal Citation Reports for IF2021). Since its launch in March 2018, OEA has been indexed in SCI, EI, DOAJ, Scopus, CA and ICI databases over the time and expanded its Editorial Board to 36 members from 17 countries and regions (average h-index 49).
The journal is published by The Institute of Optics and Electronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, aiming at providing a platform for researchers, academicians, professionals, practitioners, and students to impart and share knowledge in the form of high quality empirical and theoretical research papers covering the topics of optics, photonics and optoelectronics.
# # # # # #
More information: http://www.oejournal.org/oea
Editorial Board: http://www.oejournal.org/oea/editorialboard/list
All issues available in the online archive (http://www.oejournal.org/oea/archive).
Submissions to OEA may be made using ScholarOne (https://mc03.manuscriptcentral.com/oea).
ISSN: 2096-4579
CN: 51-1781/TN
Contact Us: oea@ioe.ac.cn
Twitter: @OptoElectronAdv (https://twitter.com/OptoElectronAdv?lang=en)
WeChat: OE_Journal
# # # # # #