An optics-free computational spectrometer using a broadband and tunable dynamic detector

Abstract

Optical spectrometers are the central instruments for exploring the interaction between light and matter. The current pursuit of the field is to design a spectrometer without the need for wavelength multiplexing optics to effectively reduce the complexity and physical size of the hardware. Based on computational spectroscopic results and combining a broadband-responsive dynamic detector, we successfully demonstrate an optics-free single-detector spectrometer that maps the tunable quantum efficiency of a superconducting nanowire into an ill-conditioned matrix to build a solvable inverse mathematical equation. Such a spectrometer can realize a broadband spectral responsivity ranging from 660 to 1900 nm. The spectral resolution at the telecom is 6 nm, exceeding the energy resolving capacity of existing infrared single-photon detectors. Meanwhile, benefiting from the optics-free setup, precise time-of-flight measurements can be simultaneously achieved. We have demonstrated a spectral LiDAR with 8 spectral channels. This work provides a concise method for building multifunctional spectrometers and paves the way for applying superconducting nanowire detectors in spectroscopy.