Dispersion-assisted high-dimensional photodetector.

Area of Science:

• Optics and Photonics
• Materials Science
• Computational Imaging

Background:

• Characterizing light's intensity, polarization, and spectrum is crucial but challenging.
• Existing polarimeters and spectrometers often require complex integration and lack multi-modal capabilities.
• High-dimensional light signatures are difficult to obtain concurrently.

Purpose of the Study:

• To demonstrate a method for concurrently characterizing full-Stokes polarization states and broadband spectrum of light.
• To enable high-dimensional light information encoding into single-shot imaging.
• To develop a compact, single-device solution for comprehensive light field analysis.

Main Methods:

• Utilized simple thin-film interfaces exhibiting spatial and frequency dispersion.
• Projected and tailored polarization and spectrum responses in the wavevector domain.
• Employed a deep residual network for deciphering the encoded high-dimensional light information.

Main Results:

• Achieved full characterization of light with arbitrarily mixed full-Stokes polarization states across a broadband spectrum using a single device and measurement.
• Demonstrated performance comparable to or better than state-of-the-art single-purpose miniaturized polarimeters or spectrometers.
• Successfully encoded complex light information into single-shot images.

Conclusions:

• Thin-film interfaces with dispersion offer a powerful approach for multi-modal light characterization.
• The developed method enables unprecedented simultaneous measurement of polarization and spectral properties.
• This technique provides an alignment-free, ultra-compact solution for advanced photodetection and imaging platforms.