Unscrambling light on a photonic chip

From a research collaboration between Politecnico di Milano (http://photonics.deib.polimi.it/) and Stanford University , a new invention that paves the way to programmable photonic processors.

It is a small silicon photonics 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 directly manipulate photonics, allowing for a considerable energy saving and data-processing speed increase.

The enabling technology behind is a non-invasive light detector, recently developed by Politecnico di Milano (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi6QN..., which allows a simple real time automatic control of the photonic device without the need for photon tapping from the signal.
Applications are expected in the fields of telecom and datacom, image processing, neural networks and quantum computing.

The article published on Light: Science and Applications can be found at the following link:
http://aap.nature-lsa.cn:8080/cms/roo...