On-chip random spectrometer

Spectrometers are widely used tools in chemical and biological sensing, material analysis, and light source characterization. The development of a high-resolution on-chip spectrometer could enable compact, low-cost spectroscopy for portable sensing as well as increasing lab-on-a-chip functionality. However, the spectral resolution of traditional grating-based spectrometers scales with the optical pathlength, which translates to the linear dimension or footprint of the system, which is limited on-chip. In this work, we utilize multiple scattering in a random photonic structure fabricated on a silicon chip to fold the optical path, making the effective pathlength much longer than the linear dimension of the system and enabling high spectral resolution with a small footprint. Of course, the random spectrometer also requires a different operating paradigm, since different wavelengths are not spatially separated by the random structure, as they would be by a grating. Instead, light transmitted through the random structure produces a wavelengthdependent speckle pattern which can be used as a fingerprint to identify the input spectra after calibration. In practice, these wavelength-dependent speckle patterns are experimentally measured and stored in a transmission matrix, which describes the spectral-to-spatial mapping of the spectrometer. After calibrating the transmission matrix, an arbitrary input spectrum can be reconstructed from its speckle pattern. We achieved sub-nm resolution with 25 nm bandwidth at a wavelength of 1500 nm using a scattering medium with largest dimension of merely 50 μm.