Miniaturized chaos-assisted Spectrometer

Computational spectrometers are at the forefront of spectroscopy, promising portable, on-chip, or in-situ spectrum analysis through the integration of advanced computational techniques into optical systems. However, existing computational spectrometer systems have yet to fully exploit optical properties due to imperfect spectral responses, resulting in increased system complexity and compromised performance in resolution, bandwidth, and footprint. In this study, we introduce optical chaos into spectrum manipulation via cavity deformation, leveraging high spatial and spectral complexities to address this challenge. By utilizing a single chaotic cavity, we achieve high diversity in spectra, facilitating channel decorrelation of 10 pm and ensuring optimal reconstruction over 100 nm within an ultra-compact footprint of 20 × 22 μm² as well as an ultra-low power consumption of 16.5 mW. Our approach not only enables state-of-the-art on-chip spectrometer performance in resolution-bandwidth-footprint metric, but also has the potential to revolutionize the entire computational spectrometer ecosystem.