Semiconductor Ring Lasers as Optical Neurons

Semiconductor Ring Lasers (SRLs) have been shown to have an operation regime in which they are excitable, when the coupling between the counterpropagating modes is asymmetric. In this regime, they fire optical pulses (spikes) as a response to noise perturbations. In this contribution we experimentally and theoretically characterize these spikes and show that their amplitude and width are inversely correlated. We will also show that SRLs can deterministically trigger spikes in each other when they are coupled through a single bus waveguide. This is a first step towards an integrated optical neural network using SRLs as building blocks.