Overview
- The team published a peer-reviewed demonstration in Nature Photonics on Oct. 30 showing a fingernail-sized silicon photonic chip that physically separates mixed light into orthogonal, mutually incoherent outputs.
- In laboratory tests the device routed the two strongest coherence modes with more than 98 percent fidelity and also verified operation in a three-mode experiment.
- The chip combines a reconfigurable network of on-chip interferometers with a self-configuring optimization algorithm that diagonalizes the light field's coherency matrix to identify and route modes.
- Researchers say the method could improve microscopy, telescope imaging and satellite communications, and teams are working with NASA and taping out next-generation chips to increase mode count, control speed and photon efficiency.
- The result realizes a theoretical idea from decades past and could help instruments recover information lost in intensity-only images by separating overlapping light into separate, processable channels.