Photonics Center Professor Siddharth Ramachandran Publishes Paper on High Resolution Spectral Metrology
Photonics Center Professor Sidhharth Ramachandran has published a paper in Nature entitled “High resolution spectral metrology leveraging topologically enhanced optical activity in fibers.”
This work discussed how the Ramachandran group has found a way to use light carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) to interact with regular, isotropic, non-chiral materials such as ordinary glass in optical fibers, to mimic and control optical activity. Since optical fibers naturally yield long interaction lengths, the cumulative effect of optical activity can now be scaled by several orders of magnitude in comparison to naturally chiral materials, and they use this enhanced effect, along with the dispersive properties of light, to construct a spectrometer that can measure the wavelength of light down to 0.3 pm precision in a single-shot measurement. This addresses a common trade-off with spectrometers, which can either be high resolution but slow, or fast but with low resolution. Read more