Stanford engineers and colleagues designed a chip that can take a muddled mixture of light from multiple lasers and output clean beams of light. It’s the first time researchers have demonstrated a device that can take in mixed, or partially coherent, light and sort its photons into a clear set of separate beams.

The finding, published in Nature Photonics, grounds long-theorized physics while unlocking a unique way of observing the world around us, with potential uses in microscopy, astronomy and more fields.

“We’re experimentally demonstrating stuff that was thought of originally in the 1980s for the first time,” said co-lead author Annie Kroo, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering. “This work has a huge bearing on a whole bunch of different applications because it allows us to think about things in a totally new way.”