Reservoir Computing System Based on Polarization Dynamics of a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier Fiber Ring Laser

All-optical reservoir computing (RC) based on polarization dynamics of a unidirectional semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) fiber ring laser is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. The SOA is used as a nonlinear node. The dynamical response in polarization of the ring laser is detected by a polarizer and a photodetector. The prediction error can be as low as 0.0762 for the Santa Fe time series prediction task, and the recognition accuracy can be as high as 100% for the signal classification task. The results show that the proposed RC has good prediction performance and strong classification ability. The polarization dynamics RC provides a new idea for the research of optical RC neural network and can be expected to process two tasks in parallel when the polarization dynamics and the intensity dynamics are used at the same time.