The Photonic Devices Group and the I3N lab, in collaboration with Stanford University, have published in the prestigious journal Light: Science and Applications (Nature Publishing Group) an important research that paves the way for new programmable photonic processors for telecom and datacom applications, image processing, neural networks and quantum computing.
The outcome is an optical device capable of unscrambling light beams that have arbitrarily mixed because of transmission through a multimode channel. With respect to conventional techniques, requiring optical/electrical conversion and a complex signal processing, this device allows for a considerable energy saving and data processing speed increase. The enabling technology behind is a non-invasive light detector, recently patented by Politecnico di Milano, which allows a simple real time automatic control of the photonic device without the need for photon tapping from the signal.
The research activity has been partially carried out at Polifab.
The work has been partially founded by Fondazione Cariplo in the framework of the 2016 ERC candidate strengthening program, under project ACTIO (Advanced Control Technologies for Integrated Optics) leaded by Francesco Morichetti.
The article published can be found at this link.
