Dual-Polarization Bandwidth-Bridged On-Chip Bandpass Sampling Fourier Transform Spectrometer from Visible to Near-Infrared

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel on-chip Fourier transform spectrometer with dual-polarization bandpass sampling, achieving broadband spectrum retrieval from 650 to 1050 nm with high resolution, suitable for miniaturized bio-sensing applications.

Contribution

It presents a new spatial heterodyne Fourier transform spectrometer integrated with a sub-wavelength grating coupler for broadband, dual-polarization on-chip spectral measurement without extensive interferometer arrays.

Findings

Achieved 400 nm bandwidth coverage from 650 to 1050 nm.

Demonstrated spectral resolution of 2-5 nm.

Implemented bandpass sampling to overcome bandwidth-resolution trade-off.

Abstract

The on-chip broadband optical spectrometers which cover the entire tissue transparency window ({\lambda}=650-1050 nm) with high resolution are highly demanded for the miniaturized bio-sensing and bio-imaging applications. Here, we propose a novel type of spatial heterodyne Fourier transform spectrometer (SHFTS) integrated with a sub-wavelength grating coupler (SWGC) for the dual-polarization bandpass sampling on the Si3N4 platform. Through tuning the coupling angles with different polarization, we experimentally demonstrated the unprecedented broadband spectrum retrieval results with the overall bandwidth coverage of 400 nm, bridging the wavelengths from 650 nm to 1050 nm, with the resolution of 2-5 nm. By applying the bandpass sampling theorem, we circumvented the intrinsic trade-off limitation between the bandwidth and resolution of SHFTS without having an outrageous number of Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) arrays or adding additional active components. The bandpass sampling SHFTS is designed to have linearly unbalanced 32 MZIs with the maximum optical path length difference of 93 {\mu}m within an overall footprint size of 4.7 mm x 0.65 mm, and the coupling angles of SWGC are varied from 0{\deg} to 32{\deg} to cover the entire tissue transparency window.