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The identification of chemicals from their mid‐infrared spectra has applications that include industrial production of chemicals, food production, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and environmental monitoring. This is generally done using laboratory benchtop tools, such as the Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. Although such systems offer high performance, alternative platforms offering reduced size, weight, and cost can enable a host of new applications, e.g. in consumer personal electronics. Here a compact microspectrometer platform for chemical identification, comprising a mid‐infrared metasurface integrated with a lightweight (≈1 g) and very small (≈1 cm3) microbolometer‐based thermal camera is experimentally demonstrated. A machine learning algorithm is trained to analyze the microspectrometer output and classify chemicals based on their mid‐infrared fingerprints. High accuracy identification of four liquid chemicals, concentration quantification of ethyl lactate in cyclohexane down to subpercentage levels, and the classification of food and drug samples is demonstrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Graphene photodetectors operating in the mid‐wave infrared (MWIR) face challenges that include the optical absorption of monolayer graphene being intrinsically low and the carrier lifetime in graphene being very short. Previous reports of graphene photoconductors in the MWIR have sought to overcome these challenges using approaches that include the integration of plasmonic nanoantennas and/or engineered electrodes. However, this has led to the photoresponse of these detectors being strongly polarization dependent. Here, a graphene photoconductor is reported that achieves polarization‐independent and fast response simultaneously via the integration of plasmonic nanoantennas that are termed Jerusalem‐cross antennas (JC‐antennas). Compared to previous works, the JC‐antennas concentrate the incident light onto graphene more efficiently with enhanced polarization‐independent optical absorption. MWIR detection is demonstrated at both room temperature and cryogenic temperatures, with measured responsivity of 14.5 V W−1 (room temperature) and 4400 V W−1 (78 K). Due to the carrier collection by the JC‐antennas and gapless band structure of graphene, the detector also shows significant and broadband photoresponse that extends to visible and near‐infrared wavelengths. The detector shows fast temporal response with a measured rise time of 3 ns, which would be more than sufficient for many practical applications (e.g., imaging). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Here, we demonstrate a proof of principle circular polarization filter based on a far-field interference effect using an array of pairs of simple nanoapertures. We demonstrate computationally and experimentally device performance which show good agreement and close to a 10% difference in transmission through the structure for left- and right-circularly polarized light. This ultracompact device could prove useful for remote sensing and advanced telecommunication applications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]