A fingernail-sized chip that untangles light itself

Light usually arrives as a mixture — beams jumbled together, their information scrambled. A team at Stanford University, working with the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, has built a fingernail-sized chip that takes in that mixed, partially coherent light and sorts it into separate, clean beams. Published in Nature Photonics, the work is the first demonstration of its kind: the chip sorted two infrared laser beams, then three, into distinct outputs. Why it matters is what clean light can reveal — depth, distance, the source of a signal — including, in the team's new collaboration with NASA, the light of distant galaxies, and one day perhaps the faint signature of a planet beside its star.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation