Abstract
Intensity, polarization and wavelength are intrinsic characteristics of light. Characterizing light with arbitrarily mixed information on polarization and spectrum is in high demand1,2,3,4. Despite the extensive efforts in the design of polarimeters5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18 and spectrometers19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27, concurrently yielding high-dimensional signatures of intensity, polarization and spectrum of the light fields is challenging and typically requires complicated integration of polarization- and/or wavelength-sensitive elements in the space or time domains. Here we demonstrate that simple thin-film interfaces with spatial and frequency dispersion can project and tailor polarization and spectrum responses in the wavevector domain. By this means, high-dimensional light information can be encoded into single-shot imaging and deciphered with the assistance of a deep residual network. To the best of our knowledge, our work not only enables full characterization of light with arbitrarily mixed full-Stokes polarization states across a broadband spectrum with a single device and a single measurement but also presents comparable, if not better, performance than state-of-the-art single-purpose miniaturized polarimeters or spectrometers. Our approach can be readily used as an alignment-free retrofit for the existing imaging platforms, opening up new paths to ultra-compact and high-dimensional photodetection and imaging.
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Data availability
The data that support the plots in this paper are available from the corresponding authors. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The generic code to generate the original data for all relevant tasks of this study is freely available at https://github.com/WeianHuang23/Dispersion-assisted_High-dimensional_Photodetector.git.
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Acknowledgements
W.L. and C.J. are supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 62134009, 62121005 and 62305328). C.-W.Q. is supported by the Competitive Research Program Award (NRF-CRP22-2019-0006 and CRP30-2023-0035) from the National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Minister’s Office Singapore and by a grant (A-0005947-16-00) from Advanced Research and Technology Innovation Centre (ARTIC), National University of Singapore. C.G. acknowledges the support from CAS Youth Innovation Promotion Association Project (no. 20211214). We thank T. Bai, S. Guo, J. Yang and M. Xiao for helpful discussions.
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W.L. conceived the project. Y.F., C.J., F.Z. and W.L. performed the theoretical calculations and design. Y.F. performed the measurements. W.H. developed the program for applying the neural network. Y.F., C.J. and Y.A. prepared the samples. W.L., C.J., Y.F., W.H., F.Z., X.L., C.-W.Q. and Y.K. discussed and analysed the results. W.L., C.-W.Q., Y.K., C.J. and C.G. wrote and revised the manuscript. W.L., C.-W.Q. and Y.K. supervised the project.
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W.L., Y.F., C.J., W.H., F.Z. and C.-W.Q. are inventors of a patent application that covers the concept and implementation of the dispersion-assisted high-dimensional photodetector and its applications. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Fan, Y., Huang, W., Zhu, F. et al. Dispersion-assisted high-dimensional photodetector. Nature (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07398-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07398-w
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