All‐optical nonlinear activation function based on stimulated Brillouin scattering
Name
Nanophotonics - 2025 - Slinkov - All‐optical nonlinear activation function based on stimulated Brillouin scattering.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.99 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e8458e24c1ab0c3adb40bbd7a5e673fc
Author(s)
Slinkov, Grigorii
Becker, Steven
Englund, Dirk
Stiller, Birgit
Date Issued
February 14, 2025
Journal
Nanophotonics
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Slinkov, G., Becker, S., Englund, D. and Stiller, B. (2025), All-optical nonlinear activation function based on stimulated Brillouin scattering. Nanophotonics, 14: 2711-2722.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Optical neural networks have demonstrated their potential to overcome the computational bottleneck of modern digital electronics. However, their development towards high-performing computing alternatives is hindered by one of the optical neural networks’ key components: the activation function. Most of the reported activation functions rely on opto-electronic conversion, sacrificing the unique advantages of photonics, such as resource-efficient coherent and frequency-multiplexed information encoding. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a photonic nonlinear activation function based on stimulated Brillouin scattering. It is coherent and frequency selective and can be tuned all-optically to take LeakyReLU, Sigmoid, and Quadratic shape. Our design compensates for the insertion loss automatically by providing net gain as high as 20 dB, paving the way for deep optical neural networks.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1515/nanoph-2024-0513
