All-optical temporal integration mediated by subwavelength heat antennas
Yi Zhang, Nikolaos Farmakidis, Ioannis Roumpos, Miltiadis Moralis-Pegios, Apostolos Tsakyridis, June Sang Lee, Bowei Dong, Yuhan He, Samarth Aggarwal, Nikos Pleros, Harish Bhaskaran · 2025
Read All-optical temporal integration mediated by subwavelength heat antennas by Yi Zhang, Nikolaos Farmakidis, Ioannis Roumpos, Miltiadis Moralis-Pegios, Apostolos Tsakyridis, June Sang Lee, Bowei Dong, Yuhan He, Samarth Aggarwal, Nikos Pleros, Harish Bhaskaran (2025) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-12847805.txt.
Description
Yi Zhang and co-authors demonstrate a computing system that works entirely with light in a 2025 study. Optical systems can run scalar math at unmatched speed, but they have struggled with the long data vectors that modern AI needs. The team's platform handles vectors of more than a quarter million entries in one unified setup.
The system splits time into slots, so signals arriving in sequence are summed and held by heat. Tiny titanium antennas soak up chosen wavelengths of light and warm up, and that warmth bends the light in a controlled way. The slow cooling of the antennas lets the device add up signals racing at fifty billion per second and apply the curved response steps that AI networks need. All of this happens in the light itself, with no detour into electronics.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Yi Zhang, Nikolaos Farmakidis, Ioannis Roumpos, Miltiadis Moralis-Pegios, Apostolos Tsakyridis, June Sang Lee, Bowei Dong, Yuhan He, Samarth Aggarwal, Nikos Pleros, Harish Bhaskaran |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2025 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 35 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |