Beijing, October 15 (Science and Technology Daily) – A team led by Professor Fang Lu in the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University has achieved a major breakthrough in the field of intelligent photonics, successfully developing the world's first sub-angstrom-level snapshot spectral imaging chip, "Yuheng." This marks a new milestone for my country's intelligent photonics technology in the field of high-precision imaging and measurement. The relevant research results have been published online in the academic journal *Nature*.

For a long time, traditional spectral measurements have been limited by the spectroscopic acquisition and solidification structure, and the inherent contradiction between spectral resolution and imaging flux has always been an unsolved scientific problem in this field. In response, the research team, based on the principle of intelligent photonics, has innovatively proposed a reconfigurable computational optical imaging architecture, which transforms the traditional physical spectroscopic limitations into a photonic modulation and computational reconstruction process.

By exploring the electro-optical reconstruction characteristics of random interference masks and lithium niobate materials, the team achieved collaborative computation of high-dimensional spectral modulation and high-throughput demodulation, ultimately developing the "Yuheng" chip. The "Yuheng" chip, measuring only about 2 cm × 2 cm × 0.5 cm, can achieve sub-angstrom-level spectral resolution and tens of millions of pixels-level spatial resolution in a wide spectral range of 400–1000 nanometers. It can simultaneously acquire full-spectrum and full-space information in a single snapshot, improving the resolution of snapshot spectral imaging by two orders of magnitude. This breaks through the long-standing bottleneck of the inability to simultaneously achieve spectral resolution and imaging throughput, opening a new path for high-resolution spectral imaging.

Fang Lu stated that "Yuheng" has overcome the challenges of resolution, efficiency, and integration in spectral imaging systems, and can be widely applied in fields such as machine intelligence, airborne remote sensing, and astronomical observation. Taking astronomical observation as an example, "Yuheng" can acquire the complete spectra of nearly 10,000 stars per second through snapshot imaging, which is expected to shorten the spectral survey cycle of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way from thousands of years to less than ten years. With its miniaturized design, it can also be carried on satellites, and is expected to create an unprecedented cosmic spectral map within a few years.