Coherent optical associative memory system that processes complex-amplitude information

A novel neural-network system dealing with lightwave phase and amplitude information is constructed as an associative memory. Experiments demonstrate that complex-amplitude vectors embedded in the neural network are recalled successfully. The coherent networks are theoretically expected to realize various attractive neural features in the future, such as carrier-frequency domain parallelism and self-organizing activeness mechanisms. The experimental result leads to such highly functional neural-network architecture and hardware, as well as future quantum neural devices.