{"id":228293,"date":"2026-01-03T13:05:58","date_gmt":"2026-01-03T19:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/optical-system-uses-diffractive-processors-to-achieve-large-scale-nonlinear-computation"},"modified":"2026-01-03T13:05:58","modified_gmt":"2026-01-03T19:05:58","slug":"optical-system-uses-diffractive-processors-to-achieve-large-scale-nonlinear-computation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/optical-system-uses-diffractive-processors-to-achieve-large-scale-nonlinear-computation","title":{"rendered":"Optical system uses diffractive processors to achieve large-scale nonlinear computation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/optical-system-uses-diffractive-processors-to-achieve-large-scale-nonlinear-computation2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed an optical computing framework that performs large-scale nonlinear computations using linear materials.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/elight.springeropen.com\/articles\/10.1186\/s43593-025-00113-w\" target=\"_blank\">Reported<\/a> in <i>eLight<\/i>, the study demonstrates that diffractive optical processors\u2014thin, passive material structures composed of phase-only layers\u2014can compute numerous nonlinear functions simultaneously, executed rapidly at extreme parallelism and spatial density, bound by the diffraction limit of light.<\/p>\n<p>Nonlinear operations underpin nearly all modern information-processing tasks, from <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/machine+learning\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">machine learning<\/a> and pattern recognition to general-purpose computing. Yet, implementing such operations optically has remained a challenge, as most <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/nonlinear+optical+effects\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">nonlinear optical effects<\/a> are weak, power-hungry, or slow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed an optical computing framework that performs large-scale nonlinear computations using linear materials. Reported in eLight, the study demonstrates that diffractive optical processors\u2014thin, passive material structures composed of phase-only layers\u2014can compute numerous nonlinear functions simultaneously, executed rapidly at extreme parallelism and spatial density, bound by [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":732,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1635,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-228293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-materials","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/732"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=228293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=228293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=228293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=228293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}