Ultrafast neural sampling with spiking nanolasers #MMPMID41339354
Boikov IK; de Rossi A; Petrovici MA
Nat Commun 2025[Dec]; ? (?): ? PMID41339354show ga
Owing to their significant advantages in terms of bandwidth, power efficiency, and latency, optical neuromorphic systems have arisen as interesting alternatives to digital electronic devices. Recently, photonic crystal nanolasers with excitable behavior were first demonstrated. Depending on the pumping strength, they emit short optical pulses - spikes - at various intervals on a nanosecond timescale. In this theoretical work, we show how networks of such photonic spiking neurons can be used for Bayesian inference through sampling from learned probability distributions. We provide a detailed derivation of translation rules from conventional sampling networks, such as Boltzmann machines, to photonic spiking networks and demonstrate their functionality across a range of generative tasks. Finally, we provide estimates of processing speed and power consumption, for which we expect improvements of several orders of magnitude over current state-of-the-art neuromorphic systems.
Nat+Commun 2025 ; ? (?): ?
