Metamaterial spectrometer on a chip for hyperspectral imaging and atmospheric sounding

The monitoring of Earth's atmosphere requires routine measurements of many gasses and aerosols. The most common technique to perform this task is hyperspectral imaging (HSI). However, with the push to integrate HSI sensing capabilities on small platforms, e.g. cubesats and UAVs, the development of smaller, cheaper, higher performing, and low power HSI systems is necessary. Current HSI systems are composed of a large and complex assortment of lenses, filters and cameras that are large, heavy, expensive, and intolerant to physical shocks—all things that make them challenging for use in space-based sensing and imaging applications. The metamaterial filter described in this work eliminates the need for many of the previously necessary optics because it can spectrally filter light independent of the lights angle of incidence—this allows for a focused beam of light to be filtered by the metamaterial. This is in distinct contrast to grating-based HSI systems where the spectrometer requires collimated light. Additionally, the metamaterial filter is designed to filter light only at the desired spectral bands; this is a great benefit for small-platform systems because of the substantially reduced data rate and required computational resources.