ABSTRACT
Novel materials and devices in photonics have the potential to revolutionize optical information processing, beyond conventional binary-logic approaches. Laser systems offer a rich repertoire of useful dynamical behaviors, including the excitable dynamics also found in the time-resolved “spiking” of neurons. This chapter provides a unified platform for spike processing with a graphene-coupled—two-section gain and absorber—laser system. It presents a unified, experimental demonstration of low-level spike processing functions in an optical platform. Spike codes exhibit the expressiveness and efficiency of analog processing with the robustness of digital communication. In the context of spike processing, excitable laser systems have been studied with the tools of bifurcation theory. The dynamical system underlying the behavior of the spike processing unit is a two-section excitable laser composed of a gain section with a saturable absorber, and mirrors for cavity feedback. The chapter demonstrates that the complex dynamics of graphene excitable lasers can form a fundamental building block for spike information processing.
