Nanyang Technological University 637371, SingaporeMachine learning software applications are nowadays ubiquitous in many fields of science and society for their outstanding capability of solving computationally vast problems like the recognition of patterns and regularities in big datasets. One of the main goals of research is the realization of a physical neural network able to perform data processing in a much faster and energyefficient way than the state-of-the-art technology. Here we show that lattices of exciton-polariton condensates accomplish neuromorphic computing using fast optical nonlinearities and with lower error rate than any previous hardware implementation. We demonstrate that our neural network significantly increases the recognition efficiency compared to the linear classification algorithms on one of the most widely used benchmarks, the MNIST problem, showing a concrete advantage from the integration of optical systems in reservoir computing architectures.

The concurrent rise of artificial intelligence and quantum information poses opportunity for creating interdisciplinary technologies like quantum neural networks. Quantum reservoir processing, introduced here, is a platform for quantum information processing developed on the principle of reservoir computing that is a form of artificial neural network. A quantum reservoir processor can perform qualitative tasks like recognizing quantum states that are entangled as well as quantitative tasks like estimating a non-linear function of an input quantum state (e.g. entropy, purity or logarithmic negativity). In this way experimental schemes that require measurements of multiple observables can be simplified to measurement of one observable on a trained quantum reservoir processor.

The rapid development of artificial neural networks and applied artificial intelligence has led to many applications. However, current software implementation of neural networks is severely limited in terms of performance and energy efficiency. It is believed that further progress requires the development of neuromorphic systems, in which hardware directly mimics the neuronal network structure of a human brain. Here, we propose theoretically and realize experimentally an optical network of nodes performing binary operations. The nonlinearity required for efficient computation is provided by semiconductor microcavities in the strong quantum light-matter coupling regime, which exhibit exciton–polariton interactions. We demonstrate the system performance against a pattern recognition task, obtaining accuracy on a par with state-of-the-art hardware implementations. Our work opens the way to ultrafast and energy-efficient neuromorphic systems taking advantage of ultrastrong optical nonlinearity of polaritons.

The availability of large amounts of data and the necessity to process it efficiently have led to rapid development of machine learning techniques. To name a few examples, artificial neural network architectures are commonly used for financial forecasting, speech and image recognition, robotics, medicine, and even research. Direct hardware for neural networks is highly sought for overcoming the von Neumann bottleneck of software implementations. Reservoir computing (RC) is a recent and increasingly popular bio-inspired computing scheme which holds promise for an efficient temporal information processing. We demonstrate the applicability and performance of reservoir computing in a general complex Ginzburg-Landau lattice model, which adequately describes dynamics of a wide class of systems, including coherent photonic devices. In particular, we propose that the concept can be readily applied in exciton-polariton lattices, which are characterized by unprecedented photonic nonlinearity, opening the way to signal processing at rates of the order of 1 Tbit s −1 .