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Source: People's Republic of China in Russian – People's Republic of China in Russian –
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Source: People's Republic of China – State Council News
BEIJING, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) — A research team from Tsinghua University has unveiled a revolutionary spectroscopic imaging chip, RAFAEL, that could change the way humanity observes the universe.
This breakthrough, published in the journal Nature, resolves the long-standing trade-off between spectral resolution and throughput/efficiency, enabling high-throughput and easily integrated snapshot spectroscopy.
Spectroscopy is a fundamental tool for revealing the physical structures and chemical compositions of substances, underpinning discoveries in physics, chemistry, astronomy and the life sciences.
However, traditional instruments have long faced challenges in achieving both ultra-high resolution and high throughput. Improving one typically requires compromising the other, creating a seemingly insurmountable barrier to achieving both simultaneously.
RAFAEL, with its Chinese name “Yuheng,” overcomes this limitation with integrated and reconfigurable lithium-niobate photonics, enabling each sensor pixel to capture full spectral data with ultra-high optical throughput.
This chip enables instantaneous spectroscopy with a spatial resolution of 10 megapixels and a spectral accuracy of 0.05 nanometers in a wavelength range from visible to near infrared.
In a real-world demonstration, RAFAEL captured spectra with such precision on up to 5,600 stars in a single exposure, exceeding the observation efficiency of the world's top-class astronomical spectrometers by more than a hundred times.
A compact yet powerful chip could help open new avenues to understanding the most mysterious phenomena in space, while advancing research from materials science to astrophysics, said Fan Lu, a professor at Tsinghua University and corresponding author of the paper.
The name "Yuheng" comes from the fifth star in the constellation Ursa Major, which ancient Chinese astronomers used to calibrate celestial movements, representing precision and balance.
Building on this legacy, the chip aims to establish a new, stable benchmark for human astronomical observations of light and the universe, Fan Lu said.
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