Miniaturization of infrared spectrometers will lead to their wider use in consumer electronics, such as smartphones enabling food control, the detection of hazardous chemicals, air pollution monitoring and wearable electronics. They can be used for the quick and easy detection of certain chemicals without using laboratory equipment. Moreover, they can be useful for the detection of counterfeit medical drugs as well as of greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2.
A team of scientists at Empa, ETH Zurich, EPFL, the University of Salamanca, Spain, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the University of Basel has built a proof-of-concept miniaturized Fourier-transform waveguide spectrometer that incorporates a subwavelength photodetector as a light sensor, consisting of colloidal mercury telluride quantum dot (Hg Te) and compatible with complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, as they report in the recent issue of Nature Photonics.
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