Phys.org August 27, 2021
The lack of modularization and lumped element reconfigurability in photonics has prevented the transition to an all-optical analog computing platform. A team of researchers in the US (George Washington University, UCLA, City College of New York) explored using numerical simulation, a nanophotonic platform based on epsilon-near-zero materials capable of solving in the analog domain partial differential equations (PDE). Wavelength stretching in zero-index media enables highly nonlocal interactions within the board based on the conduction of electric displacement, which can be monitored to extract the solution of a broad class of PDE problems. By exploiting the experimentally achieved control of deposition technique through process parameters, used in their simulations, they demonstrated the possibility of implementing the proposed nano-optic processor using CMOS-compatible indium-tin-oxide, whose optical properties can be tuned by carrier injection to obtain programmability at high speeds and low energy requirements. The nano-optical analog processor can be integrated at chip-scale, processing arbitrary inputs at the speed of light…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
