{"id":246477,"date":"2026-11-04T06:15:44","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T12:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/fingernail-sized-chip-untangles-mixed-light-into-clean-beams"},"modified":"2026-11-04T06:15:44","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T12:15:44","slug":"fingernail-sized-chip-untangles-mixed-light-into-clean-beams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/fingernail-sized-chip-untangles-mixed-light-into-clean-beams","title":{"rendered":"Fingernail-sized chip untangles mixed light into clean beams"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>The finding, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41566-026-02035-6\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Photonics<\/i>, grounds long-theorized physics while unlocking a unique way of observing the world around us, with potential uses in microscopy, astronomy and more fields.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe\u2019re experimentally demonstrating stuff that was thought of originally in the 1980s for the first time,\u201d said co-lead author Annie Kroo, a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering. \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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\u2019s 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, [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,38,219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-engineering","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}