Recently, researchers in Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (SIOM) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Fudan University, have made progress in the study of nonlinear optical response and ultrafast carrier dynamics of titanium nitride (Ti₃C₂T_x) nanosheets, prepared a Ti₃C₂T_x MXene broadband ultrafast nonlinear activator, revealing the potential of Ti₃C₂T_x for optical computing applications. The related research results have been published in Advanced Optical Materials on June 14, 2022.

Ti₃C₂T_x is a layered semiconductor material with nonlinear optical response in a wide wavelength range. In this work, Ti₃C₂T_x nanosheets with appropriate thickness were obtained via liquid-phase exfoliation technique.

Scientists prepared an all-optical nonlinear activator that utilizes 2D Ti₃C₂T_x MXene combined with the microfiber to significantly enhance the interaction of light with Ti₃C₂T_x using the evanescent field propagating along the surface of the microfiber. The generated nonlinear optical response was used as a nonlinear activation function and applied in optical computing. Scientists verified the MNIST handwritten digit recognition and Fashion-MNIST classification tasks using the optical nonlinear activation function obtained from experimental measurements with an accuracy of 97.54% and 88.01%, respectively.

The all-optical nonlinear activation functions and their principle devices demonstrated in this work are of greater value to the development of all-optical computing for efficient computation.

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of optical neural network with MXene based nonlinear activator on the right. (Image by SIOM)

Figure 2. Evaluation of high-resolution images produced by super-resolution reconstruction in terms of subjective effects. (Image by SIOM)

Article website:
https://doi.org/10.1002/adom.202200714

Contact:
WU Xiufeng
General Administrative Office
Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, CAS
Email: xfwu@siom.ac.cn
Web: http://english.siom.cas.cn/