Experimental Implementation of An All-Optical Reservoir Computer Using Photonic Time Stretch and Spectral Mixing

Reservoir computing (RC) has been widely used in processing temporal information and classification tasks due to its high efficiency in training and testing. In this paper, we have experimentally demonstrated the performance of an all-optical reservoir computer based on time stretch and spectral mixing. Spectral comb lines of the stretched optical pulse are chosen as virtual nodes in the reservoir layer. Nonlinear spectral mixing is achieved through phase modulation and semiconductor optical amplification. A simple temporal waveform classification task was implemented using the demonstrated RC system to verify the approach.