The central nervous system sends a neural impulse through an efferent nerve system toward muscles to drive movement. In an electronically artificial neural system, the electronic neural devices and interconnections prevent achieving highly connected and long-distance artificial impulse transmission and exhibit a narrow bandwidth. Here we design and demonstrate light-emitting memristors (LEMs) for the realization of an optoelectronic artificial efferent nerve, in which the LEM combines the functions of a light receiver, a light emitter, and an optoelectronic synapse in a single device. The optical signal from the pre-LEM (presynaptic membrane) acts as the input signal for the post-LEM (postsynaptic membrane), leading to one-to-many transmission, dynamic adjustable transmission, and light-trained synaptic plasticity, thus removing the physical limitation in artificially electronic neural systems. Furthermore, we construct an optoelectronic artificial efferent nerve with LEMs to control manipulators intelligently. These results promote the construction of an artificial optoelectronic nerve for further development of sensorimotor functionalities.
Keywords: artificial efferent neural system; artificial nerve; light-emitting memristor; optoelectronic memories; synapse.