Stanford scientists have built a fingernail-sized chip that turns jumbled light into clean beams

Light is something we rarely think twice about. It enters our homes through windows, illuminates the streets at night and helps us capture everything from a beautiful sunset to the tiniest details under a microscope. But what if the light reaching our eyes isn't as simple as it appears?

What if it is several sources sending out light waves that overlap, interfere with one another and arrive at slightly different times?Most cameras record this mixture as a single image. In the process, however, they can lose information that is hidden within the light itself.Researchers at Stanford University, along with collaborators in Austria and Italy, have now found a way to tackle this problem. They have developed a tiny chip, roughly the size of a fingernail, that can take mixed light and separate it into individual, clean beams.

The technology addresses a problem scientists have been thinking about since the 1980s, but which had not been demonstrated in this physical form before.Why is mixed light so difficult to work with?Not all light behaves in the same way.