A wavelength-scale black phosphorus spectrometer

On-chip spectrometers with compact footprints are being extensively investigated owing to their promising future in critical applications such as sensing, surveillance and spectral imaging. Most existing miniaturized spectrometers use large arrays of photodetection elements to capture different spectral components of incident light, from which its spectrum is reconstructed. Here, we demonstrate a mid-infrared spectrometer in the 2–9 µm spectral range, utilizing a single tunable black phosphorus photodetector with an active area footprint of only 9 × 16 µm2, along with a unique spectral learning procedure. Such a single-detector spectrometer has a compact size at the scale of the operational wavelength. Leveraging the wavelength and bias-dependent responsivity matrix learned from the spectra of a tunable blackbody source, we reconstruct unknown spectra from their corresponding photoresponse vectors. Enabled by the strong Stark effect and the tunable light–matter interactions in black phosphorus, our single-detector spectrometer shows remarkable potential in the reconstruction of the spectra of both monochromatic and broadband light. Furthermore, its ultracompact structure that is free from bulky interferometers and gratings, together with its electrically reconfigurable nature, may open up pathways towards on-chip mid-infrared spectroscopy and spectral imaging.