A team from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and Stanford University has built a chip that automatically separates partially coherent light into its component beams. The work, led by Assistant Professor Charles Roques-Carmes, was published in Nature Photonics.
The reconfigurable chip packs hundreds of optical components into an area of a few square millimetres, in a two-layer, self-configuring network of interferometers guided by control algorithms. In tests, overlapping ultraviolet beams from two lasers were separated in real time in a normally lit room; conventional optics would need hundreds of mirrors on an optical table.
Possible uses include satellite communication, where atmospheric turbulence degrades laser beams, new microscopy techniques and astronomy, for example detecting faint signals from exoplanets. A new chip generation is being fabricated, and the team plans to develop a microscope with the institute’s biologists.
