Performance limit of on-chip speckle spectrometers

Abstract: Disorder-driven, integrated speckle spectrometers offer exceptional spectral resolution within a compact design. They benefit from enhanced optical path lengths due to multiple light scattering events, however, often at the cost of low optical throughput. Here, we investigate the relationship between these two figures of merit by systematically varying the scattering strength of random-uniform disorder distributions. Furthermore, we also investigate the temperature stability of such spectrometers. Our study shows that the device resolution can be tuned from 2 nm to 20 pm, while the operating temperature ranges from 1 to more than 6 degrees and throughput can be varied by more than a factor of 10, paving the way for application-tailored design of microscale high-resolution spectrometers.