Artificial intelligence powers record-breaking all-in-one miniature spectrometers

Amazing stuff! This could be a major breakthrough! The possibilities are enormous! Will your next smartphone also come with a spectrometer?

"... Now, an international team of researchers, including the University of Cambridge, have designed a miniaturised spectrometer that breaks all current resolution records, and does so in a much smaller package, thanks to computational programmes and artificial intelligence.
The new miniaturised devices could be used in a broad range of sectors, from checking the quality of food to analysing starlight or detecting faint clues of life in outer space. ...
The result is an all-in-one spectrometer thousands of times smaller than current commercial systems. At the same time, it offers performance comparable to benchtop systems. In other words, these new spectrometers will provide portable alternatives to uncover otherwise invisible information, without even going into the lab. ...
The detector uses van der Waals heterostructures – a ‘sandwich’ of different ingredients, including graphene, molybdenum disulfide, and tungsten diselenide. Different combinations of material components enable light detection beyond the visible spectrum, as far as the near-infrared region. This means the spectrometer detects more than just colour, enabling applications such as chemical analysis and night vision. ..."

"Optical spectrometers can measure the intensity of light with spectral resolution. Although laboratory benchtop spectrometer systems offer high resolution and wide spectral range, their large size hampers them from being more widely adopted for general consumer products, such as wearable electronics. The miniaturization of spectrometers is crucial to making them cheaper and easier to integrate with other devices, which can help expand the use of such a powerful analytical tool. There is a wide range of potential applications for cheap and small-sized spectrometers, from detecting counterfeit pharmaceuticals and banknotes to monitoring specific biosignals. On page 296 of this issue, Yoon et al. (1) present a design for an ultraminiaturized spectrometer with performance approaching that of benchtop systems."

"Miniaturizing spectrometers

High-resolution spectrometry tends to be associated with bench-sized machines. Recent efforts on computational spectrometers have shown that this physical footprint can be shrunk by using nanowires and two-dimensional (2D) materials, but these devices are often associated with limited performance. Yoon et al. developed a single-detector computational spectrometer using an electrically tunable spectral response of a single junction comprising 2D van der Waal materials (see the Perspective by Quereda and Castellanos-Gomez). The electrically tunable spectral response and high performance of the tiny detector are promising for the further development of computational spectrometers."

From the abstract:

"Miniaturized computational spectrometers, which can obtain incident spectra using a combination of device spectral responses and reconstruction algorithms, are essential for on-chip and implantable applications. Highly sensitive spectral measurement using a single detector allows the footprints of such spectrometers to be scaled down while achieving spectral resolution approaching that of benchtop systems. We report a high-performance computational spectrometer based on a single van der Waals junction with an electrically tunable transport-mediated spectral response. We achieve high peak wavelength accuracy (∼0.36 nanometers), high spectral resolution (∼3 nanometers), broad operation bandwidth (from ∼405 to 845 nanometers), and proof-of-concept spectral imaging. Our approach provides a route toward ultraminiaturization and offers unprecedented performance in accuracy, resolution, and operation bandwidth for single-detector computational spectrometers."

Artificial intelligence powers record-breaking all-in-one miniature spectrometers | University of Cambridge Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to replace optical and mechanical components, researchers have designed a tiny spectrometer that breaks all current resolution records.

An ultraminiaturized spectrometer (no public access) Scaling down spectrometers could allow their application in consumer devices.

Miniaturized spectrometers with a tunable van der Waals junction (no public access)

On-chip spectrometer on a fingertip