Abstract Photonic chips are powerful tools for measuring and analyzing light, but most compact spectrometers face a fundamental trade-off: improving resolution usually requires larger devices or sacrifices in signal quality. Here, we introduce a chip-scale architecture that overcomes this limitation by extracting phase information corresponding to the hidden timing of light waves using only simple intensity measurements. Our method generalizes earlier minimum phase designs to allow sparse and non-sequential optical delays, enabling accurate phase reconstruction on a single circuit. By engineering these delays, the device can determine the wavelength of an unknown laser with sub-picometer precision, all while using just one input and one output. This single-stream design reduces loss, improves robustness, and avoids the complexity of traditional spectrometers. The result is a compact, scalable platform that enables high-accuracy wavelength metrology and opens possibilities for on-chip sensing and computational spectroscopy.
Rivera et al. (Wed,) studied this question.