No abstract

Time-delay signature (TDS) suppression of an external-cavity semiconductor laser (ECSL) is important for chaos-based applications and has been widely studied in the literature. In this paper, the chaotic output of an ECSL is injected into a semiconductor laser and TDS suppression in the regenerated time series is revisited. The focus of the current work is the influence of parameter mismatch on the TDS evolution, which is investigated experimentally and compared systematically to simulations. The experimental results demonstrate that it is much easier to achieve desired TDS suppression in the configuration composed of mismatched laser pairs. Numerical simulations confirm the validity of the experimental results. In the experiments and simulations, the influence of the injection parameters on TDS suppression is also studied and good agreement is obtained.

We report on a simple approach of time-delayed reservoir computing (RC) based on a two-element phased laser array for image identification. Here the phased laser array with optical feedback and injection is trained according to the representative characteristics extracted through histograms of oriented gradients. These characteristic vectors are multiplied by a random mask signal to form input data, which are subsequently trained in the reservoir. By optimizing the parameters of the RC, we achieve an identification accuracy of 97.44% on the MNIST dataset and 85.46% on the Fashion-MNIST dataset. These results indicate that our proposed RC indeed allows accurate classification of handwritten digit and fashion production. Moreover, we further forecast an RC scheme based on a larger-scale phased laser array, which is expected to tackle more complex tasks at a high speed. Our work offers a possibility for advanced image processing using highly integrated neuromorphic photonic systems.

We propose and numerically demonstrate a high-speed photonic reservoir computing (RC) system using a compact Fano laser (FL) with optical feedback under electrical modulation. Benefiting from its insensitivity to external feedback, an FL has a wider dynamic steady-state region compared with a conventional Fabry–Perot laser, which significantly extends the ranges of desirable RC implementation. Interestingly, we observe two separate regions of good RC performances corresponding to two scenarios of the dynamic steady state of the FL, respectively. Moreover, the robust RC performance versus the feedback phase can be achieved in one of the steady-state regions, where the laser is not destabilized for lower external reflectivity. Owing to the ultra-short photon lifetime in the FL, the information processing rate of our proposed RC system may reach 10 Gbps. More importantly, as a specific type of microscopic laser, the FL offers potential applications to RC-based integrated neuromorphic photonic systems.