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High-Throughput Total Internal Reflection Fluorescence and Direct Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy Using a Photonic Chip

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Nanophotonic waveguide chip-to-world beam scanning.

Matt Saha¹, Y Henry Wen^2,3, Andrew S Greenspon^1,4

¹The MITRE Corporation, Bedford, MA, USA.

|March 12, 2026

Summary

Researchers developed a photonic ski-jump, a novel device for scalable 2D beam scanning. This breakthrough enables high-speed optical applications by overcoming limitations of current technologies for integrated photonics.

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Area of Science:

Photonics and Integrated Optics
Nanotechnology
Quantum Information Science

Background:

Current beam-scanning technologies face a trade-off between scalability and beam quality.
Diffractive optics on photonic integrated circuits offer scalability but suffer from poor mode quality.
Micromechanical scanners provide high-quality beams but lack scalable integration.

Purpose of the Study:

To overcome limitations in current beam-scanning technologies.
To develop a scalable, high-performance photonic interface for chip-to-world applications.
To enable advancements in optical ranging, display, communication, computation, and quantum information science.

Main Methods:

Development of a photonic ski-jump: a nanoscale waveguide integrated on a piezoelectric cantilever.
Fabrication using a volume complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) foundry.
Demonstration of out-of-plane curling, emission of a diffraction-limited beam, and high-Q mechanical resonances.

Main Results:

The photonic ski-jump achieves scalable two-dimensional beam scanning in a sub-0.1 mm² footprint.
Demonstrated a footprint-adjusted spot rate of 68.6 M spots/s/mm², exceeding MEMS mirrors by over 50x.
Enabled full-color image/video projection and single-photon initialization/readout.
Uniformity across a 64 ski-jump array shows potential for gigaspot resolution at kilohertz rates.

Conclusions:

The photonic ski-jump offers a scalable solution for 2D beam scanning, overcoming existing trade-offs.
This technology enables a seamless optical pipeline between integrated photonic processors and the free-space world.
Paves the way for high-resolution, high-speed optical systems in diverse scientific and technological fields.