Recently, the research team led by Professors Ni Zhenhua and Lyu Junpeng from the School of Electronic Science and Engineering, SEU, has made significant progress in the field of spectroscopy. The research findings have been published in the internationally renowned academic journal PhotoniX (Impact Factor: 19.3), with the paper titled Miniaturized computational dispersion-engineered silicon photonic vernier caliper spectrometer.
The development of chip-scale spectroscopic detection technology is the key to miniaturized, high-performance optical sensing and imaging. Traditional spectrometers, while pursuing broad bandwidth and high resolution, often struggle to balance chip integration and portability. To address this contradiction, the team innovatively proposed a hardware–algorithm co-design approach, which deeply integrates silicon photonic chip design with computational spectral reconstruction algorithms. This approach has simultaneously achieved ultra-broadband, picometer-level high-resolution spectral detection on a micron-scale chip, setting a new record for performance per unit area. The team constructed a photonic vernier caliper architecture based on cascaded subwavelength grating microring resonators, breaking through the traditional free spectral range limit within a footprint of 55×35 μm². Combined with dispersion engineering optimization, it provides a new route for broadband, high-resolution miniaturization at the hardware level. Meanwhile, a closed-loop collaborative system from photonic encoding, electronic sampling to algorithm reconstruction was established around time-domain scanning, enabling high-speed and high-precision spectral recovery through peak deconvolution and lookup table algorithms. The system has been fully integrated on a portable platform, opening a new direction for the practical application and commercialization of chip-scale spectrometers.
Deng Hao, an SEU undergraduate student, and Associate Professor Lin Tong from the School of Electronic Science and Engineering are the co-first authors, while Prof. Lin Tong and Prof. Lyu Junpeng are the corresponding authors. The research originated from the undergraduate university-level Key SRTP Project and National SRTP Project, both of which were awarded “Excellent”. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Key Laboratory of Modern Optical Technology of the Ministry of Education, and other projects.
Paper link:https://doi.org/10.1186/s43074-026-00241-7
Source: School of Electronic Science and Engineering, SEU
Translated by: Melody Zhang
Proofread by: Gao Min
Edited by: Leah Li
