Researchers from Penn State combined two technologies to create a new chip that allows for light control without needing large and difficult materials and structures. The new photonic integrated circuit (PIC) chip would advance many projects in the optical industry, like virtual reality (VR) glasses, optical remote sensing and more.
Xingjie Ni, assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Source: Penn State College of Engineering
The team created a hybrid photonic architecture using a metasurface, which is an artificially engineered thin layer of metamaterial that allows light manipulation on the subwave-length scale, integrated onto a PIC chip. This chip has high light controllability, incorporating metasurfaces that are driven by guided waves in the PICs, combining a few complex functions onto a single chip.
Applications for the new chip include optical communications, optical remote sensing and VR and augmented reality (AR) displays. It paves the way for building multifunctional PIC devices with flexible access to free space and guided wave-driven metasurfaces with chip integration capability.
Currently, there are only two options to control light for optical devices. The first is a PIC incorporated onto small chips, which has a limited ability to control free-space light. The second option is a metasurface that cannot be integrated onto a chip. The new device addresses these problems by incorporating the best parts of both options onto one chip.
A paper on this technology was published in Science Advances.
