Photonic reservoir computer using speckle in multimode waveguide ring resonators.

Photonic reservoir computers (RC) come in single mode ring and multimode array geometries. We propose and simulate a photonic RC architecture using speckle in a multimode waveguide ring resonator that requires neither the ultra-high-speed analog-digital conversion nor the spatial light modulator used in other designs. We show that the equations for propagation around a multimode (MM) ring resonator along with an optical nonlinearity, and optical feedback can be cast exactly in the standard RC form with speckle mixing performing the pseudo-random matrix multiplications.

Classification of time-domain waveforms using a speckle-based optical reservoir computer.

Reservoir computing is a recurrent machine learning framework that expands the dimensionality of a problem by mapping an input signal into a higher-dimension reservoir space that can capture and predict features of complex, non-linear temporal dynamics. Here, we report on a bulk electro-optical demonstration of a reservoir computer using speckles generated by propagating a laser beam modulated with a spatial light modulator through a multimode waveguide. We demonstrate that the hardware can successfully perform a multivariate audio classification task performed using the Japanese vowel speakers public data set.