Nanoscale integrated photonic devices and circuits offer a path to ultra-low power computation at the few-photon level. Here we propose an optical circuit that performs a ubiquitous operation: the controlled, random-access readout of a collection of
stored memory phases or, equivalently, the computation of the inner product of a vector of phases with a binary selector vector, where the arithmetic is done modulo 2pi and the result is encoded in the phase of a coherent field. This circuit, a collection of cascaded interferometers driven by a coherent input field, demonstrates the use of coherence as a computational resource, and of the use of recently-developed mathematical tools for modeling optical circuits with many coupled parts. The construction extends in a straightforward way to the computation of matrix-vector and matrix-matrix products, and, with the inclusion of an optical feedback loop, to the computation of a weighted readout of stored memory phases. We note some applications of these circuits for error correction and for computing tasks requiring fast vector inner products, e.g. statistical classification and some machine learning algorithms.
Photonic circuits in which stateful components are coupled via guided electromagnetic fields are natural candidates for native implementation of iterative stochastic algorithms based on propagation of information around a graph. Conversely, such mess
age passing algorithms suggest novel circuit architectures for signal processing and computation that are well matched to nanophotonic device physics. Here we construct and analyze a quantum optical model of a photonic circuit for iterative decoding of a class of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes called expander codes. Our circuit can be understood as an open quantum system whose autonomous dynamics map straightforwardly onto the subroutines of an LDPC decoding scheme, with several attractive features: it can operate in the ultra-low power regime of photonics in which quantum fluctuations become significant, is robust to noise and component imperfections, achieves comparable performance to known iterative algorithms for this class of codes, and provides an instructive example of how nanophotonic cavity quantum electrodynamic components can enable useful new information technology even if the solid-state qubits on which they are based are heavily dephased and cannot support large-scale entanglement.
