Prof. Zhang Yongzhe's team from the Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), in collaboration with Prof. Wang Qijie's team from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, and Prof. Duan Xiangfeng's team from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), United States, have achieved important progress in new optoelectronic device and chip research. Their research papers have been published online by Nature Communications (Dr. Deng Wenjie, Associate Prof. Zheng Zilong, Assistant Prof. Li Jingzhen contributed equally) and Advanced Materials (Dr. Deng Wenjie as the first author). For both papers, the first authors are primarily affiliated to BJUT. The above research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Beijing Natural Science Foundation, and other organizations.

The development of spectral information detection chips is one of the most important areas of research linked to the development of new generation information technology. At present, most existing detection methods rely on the working mechanism depending on light dispersion structure, and are faced with problems including highly complex processing difficulty and miniaturization limited by the fundamental optical path length. For the first time, Prof. Zhang Yongzhe's team and Prof. Duan Xiangfeng's team have proposed the design of an ultra-miniatured on-chip spectrometer based on a two-dimensional van der Waals heterostructure. The teams have achieved spectral reconstruction and spectral imaging in a device with an active footprint of less than 10 μm. This research achievement offers an attractive solution for on-chip infrared spectroscopy.

Integrated on-chip polarimetry instrument is an important step towards future advanced optoelectronic chips. However, the technical route relying on the artificial polarized optical physical structure still confront problems with high loss and processing difficulty. The research team led by Zhang Yongzhe in collaboration with Wang Qijie's team has put forward the cutting-edge design concept of "switchable unipolar-barrier Van der Waals heterostructures with natural anisotropy for full linear polarimetry detection", which reveals how the micro devices can realize full linear polarimetry detection and verifies the practical application value of this device. This method, with the capabilities of detecting full linear SOP, is promising for the next-generation of on-chip miniaturized polarimeters.