Diffractive optical computing in free space

Jingtian Hu; Deniz Mengu; Dimitrios C Tzarouchis; Brian Edwards; Nader Engheta; Aydogan Ozcan

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-45982-w

Diffractive optical computing in free space

Nat Commun. 2024 Feb 20;15(1):1525. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45982-w.

Authors

Jingtian Hu^{1

2

3}, Deniz Mengu^{1

2

3}, Dimitrios C Tzarouchis^{4

5}, Brian Edwards⁴, Nader Engheta⁴, Aydogan Ozcan^{6

7

8}

Affiliations

¹ Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
² Bioengineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
³ California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
⁴ Electrical and Systems Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
⁵ Meta Materials Inc., Athens, 15123, Greece.
⁶ Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA. ozcan@g.ucla.edu.
⁷ Bioengineering Department, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA. ozcan@g.ucla.edu.
⁸ California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA. ozcan@g.ucla.edu.

Abstract

Structured optical materials create new computing paradigms using photons, with transformative impact on various fields, including machine learning, computer vision, imaging, telecommunications, and sensing. This Perspective sheds light on the potential of free-space optical systems based on engineered surfaces for advancing optical computing. Manipulating light in unprecedented ways, emerging structured surfaces enable all-optical implementation of various mathematical functions and machine learning tasks. Diffractive networks, in particular, bring deep-learning principles into the design and operation of free-space optical systems to create new functionalities. Metasurfaces consisting of deeply subwavelength units are achieving exotic optical responses that provide independent control over different properties of light and can bring major advances in computational throughput and data-transfer bandwidth of free-space optical processors. Unlike integrated photonics-based optoelectronic systems that demand preprocessed inputs, free-space optical processors have direct access to all the optical degrees of freedom that carry information about an input scene/object without needing digital recovery or preprocessing of information. To realize the full potential of free-space optical computing architectures, diffractive surfaces and metasurfaces need to advance symbiotically and co-evolve in their designs, 3D fabrication/integration, cascadability, and computing accuracy to serve the needs of next-generation machine vision, computational imaging, mathematical computing, and telecommunication technologies.

Publication types

Review