Optical fiber speckle spectrometer based on reversed-lens smartphone microscope

Smartphones are a potentially powerful platform for scientific instruments. Here, we demonstrate speckle spectroscopy with smartphone-level hardware. This technique promises greater performance thresholds than traditional diffraction gratings. Light is injected into an optical fiber and the emergent speckle patterns are imaged by a reversed-lens smartphone camera. The smartphone then uses an algorithm, running on a mobile computing app, to determine, in less than one second, the (hitherto unknown) input spectrum. We reconstruct a variety of visible-wavelength (470–670 nm) single and multi-peaked spectra using a tunable source. The latter also include a metameric pair, i.e., two spectra that are different, yet represent colors that are indistinguishable to the human eye.