Tiny infrared chip could improve detection of gases and heat

Infrared cameras can be used to spot useful information that our eyes can’t see, such as gases escaping from a pipeline, chemicals in the atmosphere, or heat leaking from a building. But sensing infrared light in sophisticated ways still requires expensive and bulky systems.

Now MIT researchers have created a chip-based optical device that can dynamically control incoming infrared light, to act as a tunable lens that gathers additional information for infrared cameras. Each microscopic pixel of the device’s lens can control infrared light independently, allowing it to change its focus and help cameras detect different signals without moving parts.

The system is described in a paper published in Nature Communications. The researchers also explain how they built a lab-scale demonstration using mostly conventional manufacturing processes in a semiconductor chip factory, suggesting the approach could be implemented at industrial scales.

The technology could enable compact, tunable infrared cameras for more dynamic thermal imaging, chemical sensing, pollution monitoring, and even new kinds of optical computing.

“This could give us more information as we study space, or help with environmental protections where you want to monitor for specific compounds in the atmosphere,” explains first author Cosmin-Constantin Popescu PhD ’25. “Thermal imaging is another application, and you can think of military applications where night vision goggles are currently being used. Basically, a lot of organic molecules absorb in the mid-infrared wavelength, and you could use this system to detect them.”

Joining Popescu on the paper are MIT PhD students Maarten Robbert Anton Peters and Khoi Phuong Dao; Dynasil company scientists Oleg Maksimov and Harish Bhandari; University of Central Florida PhD candidate Kathleen Richardson and scientist Rashi Sharma; University of Washington Professor Arka Majumdar; Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology Associate Professor Hyun Jung Kim; MIT postdoc Rui Chen; Luigi Ranno PhD ’25; Brian Mills ’20, PhD ’26; Draper Laboratory scientist Dennis Calahan; MIT principal investigator Tian Gu; and Juejun Hu, MIT’s John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

Chip-based lenses

In recent years, researchers have developed ways to dynamically control light by etching tiny, precise patterns on transparent materials known as “metasurfaces,” which could enable more compact, programmable cameras and other advanced optical devices.

Hu’s research group at MIT has experimented with a class of metasurfaces that shift from solid to liquid after heat is applied. The phase changes can be harnessed to control how the materials interact with light. In 2021, Hu and collaborators created a miniature lens that could adjust its focus to different depths through such phase changes.

The device worked reliably, but it could only adjust focus all at once across the entire material, which is how most metasurfaces work. For their new study the researchers wanted to build on that approach to control light independently at each microscopic pixel of the material.

“Most active metasurfaces trying to do single-pixel tuning need wires going to every pixel, and how you route the wires becomes a big issue,” Hu explains. “The best approach so far has been one-dimensional pixel control with a bunch of wires.”

The researchers also wanted to create a system that worked with the mid-infrared wavelength of light, which the human eye can’t see but is useful for detecting heat signatures and molecules including methane and propane. Mid-infrared detection devices are already used to detect gas leaks and study Earth’s atmosphere, and for a number of defense and aerospace applications.

To build their system, the researchers adapted an approach commonly used in displays in which two layers of neatly packed copper wires are placed on top of each other perpendicularly. Below the wires is a layer of doped silicon that generates heat at the cross points of the wires and sits on top of the phase-change material. The silicon’s heat is used to switch each pixel of the material between crystalline and amorphous structures, which changes how the material interacts with the infrared light coming in. The silicon also includes a diode selector, which helps prevent unintended currents from leaking through neighboring pixels.

“We did some calculations showing this architecture allows us to scale to potentially millions of pixels without having any issues with the [unintended] currents,” Hu says. “The key innovation is this crossbar architecture, which creates a scalable way to increase the pixel-level switching of metasurfaces. We didn’t invent this architecture, it’s used in displays, but it’s the first time anyone’s used it for active phase-change metasurfaces to show you can get pixel-level control. People have been working toward two-dimensional pixel-level control for a long time, and it’s the first time anyone’s implemented it.”

The researchers worked with equipment in MIT.nano and with a factory that manufactures semiconductor chips, ultimately creating a two-dimensional system that featured a 6-by-6 metasurface pixel array. They tested their system and found it could switch on and off reliably.

“We found this mesh architecture to be very resilient,” Popescu says. “You don’t want these materials to switch once and not work anymore. You want it to switch a large number of times: maybe tens of thousands of times or more.”

Scaling up

The researchers say integrating part of their system’s design into existing semiconductor manufacturing should help it move beyond a research prototype.

“As you want to scale up, you need something that’s part of a consistent process, and that’s why chip foundry manufacturing becomes so important,” Hu says. “Working with a semiconductor foundry with well-defined process control is very powerful. It also allows you to implement each of the components into a single efficient process.”

The researchers are working to add more pixels to their array and develop more robust versions of their system so that it can start capturing more infrared information.

“In lots of cases when you’re taking images, you have prior knowledge of what you’re looking for,” Hu says. “You might be looking for a human in a dark room, or some specific features in an image, like a tree, and that prior information can be useful because now you can configure this system to specifically highlight those features.”

Hu also notes that researchers have used metasurfaces to emulate computational neural networks that power AI systems, though he notes that applications could be farther away from taking hold.

“This could enable more effective optical computing, where metasurfaces are used to encode network weights in neural networks,” Hu explains. “When light passes through the material, it interacts with the metasurface, and that information gets encoded in such a way that you can infer computational results. Researchers have already used this approach to emulate very complex neural networks.”

The work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Research Foundation of Korea, and the Draper Scholar Program.