Scalable nonlinear optical computing with multimode fibers

An optical computing framework based on spatiotemporal nonlinear effects of multimode fibers is presented. Experimentally, a powerful computation engine can be realized using linear and nonlinear interactions of spatial fiber modes. With the present optical scheme, we demonstrated excellent performance on a variety of classification and regression tasks. Our studies showed that spatiotemporal fiber nonlinearities are as effective as digital neural network structures in challenging computational tasks. Featuring better energy efficiency and easy scalability, our method provides a new approach to optical computation.