Optical computing
Optical computing performs calculations with light — using photons in waveguides, interferometers, and nonlinear materials to move and transform data. It is especially suited to the matrix multiplications at the heart of neural networks.
Light carries information with very low loss and heat and at enormous bandwidth, promising orders-of-magnitude gains in speed and energy efficiency for AI and communications.
Photonic accelerators for specific operations exist in the lab and early products, but general-purpose optical computers and reliable optical memory remain unsolved.
The discovery loop, applied.
Through the Computational Discovery center, ASIZ aims the discovery loop at optical computing: frontier models survey the literature and simulate the possibilities, rank the experiments most likely to resolve the open questions, and partner labs run the decisive ones — with results shared openly.