MIT’s novel light source efficiently beams light into free space

12 Mar 2026

Photonic device that curls beam off chip surface could advance displays, communications, quantum computing.

Researchers from MIT, Cambridge, Mass., and elsewhere have developed what they call “a new class of photonic devices that enable the precise emission of light from an optical chip into free space in a scalable way”.

The novel chip uses an array of microscopic structures that curl upward, resembling tiny, glowing “ski jumps”, says the MIT announcement. The researchers can precisely control how light is emitted from thousands of these tiny structures at once.

The achievement is described in Nature.

The team has used this new platform to project detailed, full-color images that are roughly half the size of a grain of table salt. Used in this way, the MIT group says, the technology could aid in the development of lightweight augmented reality glasses or compact displays. They also demonstrated how photonic ski jumps could be used to control quantum qubits in a quantum computing system.

“On a chip, light travels in wires, but in our normal, free-space world, light travels wherever it wants,” explained Henry Wen, a visiting research scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT, research scientist at MITRE, and co-lead author of the Nature paper. “Interfacing between these two worlds has long been a challenge. But now, with this new platform, we can create thousands of individually controllable laser beams that can interact with the world outside the chip in a single shot.”

Scalable platform

This work grew out of the Quantum Moonshot Program, a collaboration between MIT, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the MITRE Corporation, and Sandia National Laboratories to develop a novel quantum computing platform using the diamond-based qubits being developed in the Englund lab.

These diamond-based qubits are controlled using laser beams, and the researchers needed a way to interact with millions of qubits at once. “We can’t control a million laser beams, but we may need to control a million qubits. So, we needed something that can shoot laser beams into free space and scan them over a large area, kind of like firing a T-shirt gun into the crowd at a sports stadium,” said Wen.

To create a scalable platform, the researchers developed a new fabrication technique. Their method produces photonic chips with tiny structures that curve upward off the chip’s surface to shine laser beams into free space. They built the “ski jumps” for light by creating two-layer structures from two different materials. Each material expands differently when it cools down from the high fabrication temperatures.

The researchers designed the structures with special patterns in each layer so that, when the temperature changes, the difference in strain between the materials causes the entire structure to curve upward as it cools.

This is the same effect as in an old-fashioned thermostat, which utilizes a coil of two metallic materials that curl and uncurl based on the temperature in the room, triggering the HVAC system. “Both of these materials, silicon nitride and aluminum nitride, were separate technologies. Finding a way to put them together was really the fabrication innovation that enables the ski jumps. This would not have been possible without the contributions of Matt Eichenfield and Andrew Leenheer at Sandia National Labs,” Wen said.

On the chip, connected waveguides funnel light to the ski jump structures. The researchers use a series of modulators to control how that light is turned on and off, enabling them to project light off the chip and move it around in free space.

No error-correction required

“This system is so stable we do not need to correct for errors. The pattern stays perfectly still on its own. We just calculate what color lasers need to be on at a given time and then turn it on,” he said.

Because the individual points of light, or pixels, are so tiny, the researchers can use this platform to generate extremely high-resolution displays. For instance, with their technique, 30,000 pixels can be fit into the same area that can hold only two pixels used in smart phone displays, Wen said. “Our platform is the ideal optical engine because our pixels are at the physical limit of how small a pixel can be,” he added.

Beyond high-resolution displays and larger quantum computers with diamond-based qubits, the method could be used to produce lidars that are small enough to fit on tiny robots. It could also be utilized in 3D printing processes that fabricate objects using lasers to cure layers of resin. Because their chip generates controllable beams of light so rapidly, it could greatly increase the speed of these printing processes, allowing users to create more complex objects.

In the future, the researchers want to scale their system up and conduct additional experiments on the yield and uniformity of the light, design a larger system to capture light from an array of photonic chips with “ski jumps,” and conduct robustness tests to see how long the devices last. “We envision this opening the door to a new class of lab-on-chip capabilities and lithographically defined micro-opto-robotic agents,” said Wen.