Artificial intelligence is deeply involved in our daily lives via reinforcing the digital transformation of modern economies and infrastructure. It relies on powerful computing clusters, which face bottlenecks of power consumption for both data transmission and intensive computing. Meanwhile, optics (especially optical communications, which underpin today’s telecommunications) is penetrating short-reach connections down to the chip level, thus meeting with AI technology and creating numerous opportunities. This book is about the marriage of optics and AI and how each part can benefit from the other. Optics facilitates on-chip neural networks based on fast optical computing and energy-efficient interconnects and communications. On the other hand, AI enables efficient tools to address the challenges of today’s optical communication networks, which behave in an increasingly complex manner. The book collects contributions from pioneering researchers from both academy and industry to discuss the challenges and solutions in each of the respective fields.

Written by ten leading experts in the field, Optical Computing cover topics such as optical bistability, optical interconnects and circuits, photorefractive devices, spatial light modulators, associative memory, and optical computer architectures.

Mathematical methods play a significant role in the rapidly growing field of nonlinear optical materials. This volume discusses a number of successful or promising contributions. The overall theme of this volume is twofold: (1) the challenges faced in computing and optimizing nonlinear optical material properties; and (2) the exploitation of these properties in important areas of application. These include the design of optical amplifiers and lasers, as well as novel optical switches. Research topics in this volume include how to exploit the magnetooptic effect, how to work with the nonlinear optical response of materials, how to predict laser-induced breakdown in efficient optical devices, and how to handle electron cloud distortion in femtosecond processes.

A Unique, Cutting-Edge Approach to Optical Filter Design With more and more information being transmitted over fiber-optic lines, optical filtering has become crucial to the advanced functionality of today's communications networks. Helping researchers and engineers keep pace with this rapidly evolving technology, this book presents digital processing techniques for optical filter design. This higher-level approach focuses on filter characteristics and enables readers to quickly calculate the filter response as well as tackle larger and more complex filters. The authors incorporate numerous theoretical and experimental results from the literature and discuss applications to a variety of systems-including the new wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology, which is fast becoming the preferred method for system upgrade and expansion. Special features of this book include: * The theory underlying various architectures that can approximate any filter function * Filter design techniques applicable to a broad range of materials systems-from silica to fiber to microelectromechanical (MEM) systems * Design examples relevant to filters for WDM systems and planar waveguide devices * 250 figures as well as problem sets for use in graduate-level studies

This invaluable second edition provides more in-depth discussions and examples in various chapters. Based largely on the authors' own in-class lectures as well as research in the area, the comprehensive textbook serves two purposes. The first introduces some traditional topics such as matrix formalism of geometrical optics, wave propagation and diffraction, and some fundamental background on Fourier optics. The second presents the essentials of acousto-optics and electro-optics, and provides the students with experience in modeling the theory and applications using a commonly used software tool MATLAB®.