Published in Nature this week, the chip — called RAFAEL, or “Yuheng” in Chinese — resolves the long-standing trade-off between spectral resolution and throughput, allowing high-performance snapshot spectroscopy that is compact and easy to integrate.
Spectroscopy is a key method for identifying the physical structures and chemical compositions of matter, supporting discoveries across physics, chemistry, astronomy, and life sciences.
Conventional instruments have struggled to achieve both ultra-high resolution and high throughput at once. Enhancing one typically reduces the other, creating a major limitation in the field.
RAFAEL breaks that barrier through integrated and reconfigurable lithium-niobate photonics, enabling each pixel on the sensor to capture complete spectral data with extremely high optical transmittance.
The chip provides snapshot spectroscopy with 10-megapixel spatial resolution and 0.05-nanometer spectral precision, covering visible to near-infrared wavelengths.
In an on-sky test, RAFAEL recorded spectra at that precision from up to 5,600 stars in a single exposure — more than a hundredfold increase in efficiency over top-tier astronomical spectrometers.
Compact yet powerful, the chip could open new paths for studying dark matter, black holes, and other cosmic mysteries, while also advancing research in materials science and astrophysics, said Fang Lu, a professor at Tsinghua and corresponding author of the study.
“Yuheng” takes its name from the fifth star in the Big Dipper, historically used by Chinese astronomers to calibrate celestial movements — a symbol of precision and balance.
Building on that heritage, the chip aims to set a new benchmark for observing light and the universe, Fang said.