Abstract
On-chip integrable circularly polarized light (CPL) detectors hold significant potential for applications in optical communications, bioimaging, quantum information, and intelligent sensing, enabling chip-scale chiral light detection and information processing. However, current developments in materials and structural designs struggle to achieve wide-spectral detection capability while maintaining high circular polarization discrimination. This limitation significantly constrains the practical applicability of such detectors in complex environments and object detection scenarios. Herein, we propose a CPL detector based on a twist-stacked black phosphorus (b-p) system. By utilizing twisted b-p as an artificially constructed unit with chiral response and designing a symmetry-stacked sandwich structure in space, we achieve bipolar circular polarization detection and imaging across a wide wavelength range (from visible light to mid-infrared), with peak responsivity reaching 0.1 A/W. This design demonstrates both theoretically and experimentally the feasibility of utilizing a twist-stacked b-p system for wide-spectral CPL detection. This advancement offers valuable insights for addressing the bottlenecks in chip-integrated CPL detection technology.
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Data availability
All the technical details for producing the figures are provided in the supplementary information. The data are available from the corresponding authors X. C. (chenxl@sustech.edu.cn); X. L. Y. (yuxlong6@mail.sysu.edu.cn); C. W. Q. (chengwei.qiu@nus.edu.sg) and W. B. G. (wbgao@ntu.edu.sg) upon request.
Code availability
All the technical details for implementing the simulation are provided in the Supplementary Information. Codes are available from the corresponding authors upon request.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by ASTAR (M21K2c0116, M24M8b0004), NTU Tamesek Lab (TLSP24-04), Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF-CRP30-2023-0003, NRF-CRP31-0001, NRF2023-ITC004-001 and NRF-MSG-2023-0002) and Singapore Ministry of Education Tier 2 Grant (MOE-T2EP50221-0005, MOE-T2EP50222-0018). X.-L.Y. is supported by the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (Grant No. 2023A1515011852). X. C. is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62275117) and Shenzhen Excellent Youth Program (RCYX20221008092900001). X. W. is supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2024YFE0211900). X.-L.Y. is supported by the Shenzhen Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. JCYJ20250604174400001) and the Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation (Grant No. 2023A1515011852).
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H.J., W-b.G. and C.-W.Q. conceived the project. H.J., L.A., Y.Z., Y.Y., X.D., and J.F. performed the measurements. H.J. and L.A. fabricated the devices. H.J. analyzed the data. H.J., X.C., and X.Y. performed the theoretical analysis. H.J., X.Y., C.-W.Q. and W.-b.G. wrote the manuscript. C.-W.Q. and W-b.G. supervised the project. All the authors, including R.H., G.X., L.A., X.W., and X.C. contributed to the discussion of the results.
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Jiang, H., An, L., Chen, X. et al. Twist-stacked black phosphorus for wide-spectral chiral photodetection. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68531-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-68531-z
