Photonic Machines for Large-Scale Applications and Fundamental Physics

Which is the simplest way to process information with light? If we use integrated optics, we need highly optimized fabrication steps for devices with many channels. If we use wavelength multiplexing, we need sophisticated modulators and expensive filters. But optics deals with beams of light, and there is no potential limit to the information density we can store in a beam of light. So, we can use holograms to exploit the three-dimensional information and demonstrate demanding computational tasks as natural language processing [1].