Dr. Guo Junxiong, distinguished Research Fellow of the College of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering of Chengdu University (CDU), recently published a paper "Chromatic Plasmonic Polarizer-Based Synapse for All-Optical Convolutional Neural Network" in Nano Letters, a top international academic journal, in collaboration with Dr. Liu Yu from Tsinghua University. The paper was selected as a Supplementary Cover for the current issue of Nano Letters (October 25). Dr. Guo was the first author of the paper and Dr. Liu was the corresponding author, with CDU as the first author's affiliation. Up to now, this is the first academic paper published as a Supplementary Cover in Nano Letters, an international top journal, with CDU as the first author's affiliation.

The research is funded by the Youth Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the CDU high-level talent cultivation plan.

This paper presents a novel surface plasmon resonance polarizer-based all-optical synapse for implementing convolutional filters and optical convolutional neural networks that are similar to the human visual system. The all-optical synaptic device comprises nanoscale crossed gold arrays with varying vertical and horizontal arms that respond selectively to the incident light's polarization angle. The device achieved excellent performance in four different convolutional results for classifying the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) handwritten digit data set. After being trained on 1,000 images, the all-optical neural network achieved a classification accuracy of over 98% when tested on a separate set of 10,000 images. This presents a promising approach for designing artificial neural networks with efficient hardware and energy consumption, low cost, and scalability.

Nano Letters is a prestigious top journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS), and a top one in SCI Zone I of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is also a Nature Index journal, recognized as a world-class journal in the field of nanotechnology, which mainly publishes highly innovative research papers, with the latest impact factor of 10.8 and a five-year impact factor of 11.2.

Paper link: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.nanolett.3c02194

Cover link: https://pubs.acs.org/cms/10.1021/nalefd.2023.23.issue-20/asset/nalefd.2023.23.issue-20.xlargecover-3.jpg