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Integrated lithium niobate photonics for sub-ångström snapshot spectroscopy

Nature volume 646, pages 567–575 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Spectroscopy is a pivotal tool for determining the physical structures and chemical compositions of materials and environments, and it is commonly used across diverse scientific fields1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16. Conventionally, spectroscopic techniques rely on narrow slits or gratings, which impose a trade-off between spectral resolution and optical transmittance17,18,19,20,21,22, thus precluding measurements with simultaneous high sensitivity and high efficiency. Here we introduce RAFAEL, a sub-ångström ultra-high-transmittance snapshot spectroscopic technique, which targets this trade-off with integrated and reconfigurable photonics based on lithium niobate. Its design comprises bulk lithium niobate as an interference mask with a pixel-wise electrically tunable spectral response and delivers picometre-scale modulation with a high optical transmittance. Our approach achieves 88-Hz snapshot spectroscopy with a spectral resolution of approximately 0.5 Å at 400–1,000 nm (R = 12,000), spatial resolution of 2,048 × 2,048 and 73.2% total optical transmittance. Compared with state-of-the-art spectroscopic imagers23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34, RAFAEL offers double the total transmittance and a nearly two orders of magnitude improvement in spectral resolving power, as verified by extensive experiments. In particular, RAFAEL captured sub-ångström spectra, including all atomic absorption peaks, of up to 5,600 stars in a single snapshot, indicating ×100–10,000 improvement in observational efficiency compared with world-class astronomical spectrometers17,18,19,20,21. This high-performing yet easily integrated snapshot spectroscopic method could drive advances in fields ranging from material science to astrophysics.

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Fig. 1: Concept and universal application of RAFAEL.
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 2: The structure and properties of RAFAEL.
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 3: Spatio-temporal–spectral imaging based on physical state adaptive intelligent reconstruction.
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.
Fig. 4: Atomic spectroscopy, material identification and astronomical observational experiments with RAFAEL.
ImageThe alternative text for this image may have been generated using AI.

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Data availability

The data supporting the findings of this study are available in the Article, Supplementary Information and are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16936676)59.

Code availability

The codes are available at Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16936676)59 and from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by Natural Science Foundation of China (Contract Nos. 62125106 and 62427804), in part by the Tsinghua University Dushi Program (Grant No. 20251080107), in part by the Beijing Outstanding Young Scientist Program (Contract No. JWZQ20240101009) and in part by the Xplorer Prize.

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Zhiyang Yao, Shuyang Liu, Yingce Wang

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronic Engineering, Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Zhiyang Yao, Shuyang Liu, Yingce Wang, Xiaoyun Yuan & Lu Fang

  2. Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Lu Fang

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  1. Zhiyang Yao
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Contributions

L.F. initiated and supervised the project. Z.Y., S.L. and L.F. conceived the idea. Z.Y. and S.L. developed the methods and designed the lithium niobate integrated imager. Z.Y, S.L and Y.W. conducted the simulations and ran the experiments. Z.Y., S.L., Y.W., X.Y. and L.F. analysed the results and contributed to the preparation of the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lu Fang.

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Nature thanks David Brady, Felix Heide and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Extended result for astronomical snapshot spectroscopy.

The pseudo-color spectral image of the Lyra constellation captured by RAFAEL using a 10 mm short-focus commercial lens. The spatial pixels of the result are 4032×3072. The spatial size of each star in the image has been enlarged for display. The color is derived from 12,000 spectral channels, reflecting the apparent magnitude, spectral type, and surface temperature of the stars.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Extended results of atomic spectroscopy.

Extended result for atomic spectroscopy. The Comparison of stellar atomic spectra obtained from our RAFAEL and the ground truth (B-type to A-type star). RAFAEL can accurately reconstruct the absorption peaks broadened at the ångström level, thereby distinguishing various types of stars based on their spectra. The results were obtained from a single-frame measurement. 10000 spectral channels from 4000 Å to 9000 Å for display.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information (download PDF )

Supplementary Notes 1–13 detailing methodological explanations and extended analyses, Tables 1–5 summarizing the experimental data and statistical analyses, and Figs. 1–38 illustrating extra results supporting the main text.

Supplementary Video 1 (download MP4 )

Astronomical snapshot hyperspectral imaging. This video demonstrates the performance of RAFAEL with a single-frame acquisition (exposure 700 ms), covering a field of view of 86° × 70°, with an original spatial resolution of 4,032 × 3,072 and 12,000 spectral channels (400–1,000 nm). It presents the 12,000 spectral channels in a zoomed-in 512 × 512 region at 120 fps, displayed as a heat-map pseudocolour sequence.

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Yao, Z., Liu, S., Wang, Y. et al. Integrated lithium niobate photonics for sub-ångström snapshot spectroscopy. Nature 646, 567–575 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09591-x

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