Compact silicon multimode waveguide spectrometer with enhanced bandwidth

Compact, broadband, and high-resolution spectrometers are appealing for sensing applications, but difficult to fabricate. Here we show using calibration data a spectrometer based on a multimode waveguide with 2 GHz resolution, 250 GHz bandwidth, and a 1.6 mm × 2.1 mm footprint. Typically, such spectrometers have a bandwidth limited by the number of modes supported by the waveguide. In this case, an on-chip mode-exciting element is used to repeatably excite distinct collections of waveguide modes. This increases the number of independent spectral channels from the number of modes to this number squared, resulting in an extension of the usable range

Wavelength-scale stationary-wave integrated Fourier-transform spectrometry

Spectrometry is a general physical-analysis approach for investigating light-matter interactions. However, the complex designs of existing spectrometers render them resistant to simplification and miniaturization, both of which are vital for applications in micro- and nanotechnology and which are now undergoing intensive research. Stationary-wave integrated Fourier-transform spectrometry (SWIFTS)-an approach based on direct intensity detection of a standing wave resulting from either reflection (as in the principle of colour photography by Gabriel Lippmann) or counterpropagative interference phenomenon-is expected to be able to overcome this drawback. Here, we present a SWIFTS-based spectrometer relying on an original optical near-field detection method in which optical nanoprobes are used to sample directly the evanescent standing wave in the waveguide. Combined with integrated optics, we report a way of reducing the volume of the spectrometer to a few hundreds of cubic wavelengths. This is the first attempt, using SWIFTS, to produce a very small integrated one-dimensional spectrometer suitable for applications where microspectrometers are essential