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Polarization Multiplexed Diffractive Computing: All-Optical Implementation of a Group of Linear Transformations Through a Polarization-Encoded Diffractive Network

Research on optical computing has recently attracted significant attention due to the transformative advances in machine learning. Among different approaches, diffractive optical networks composed of spatially-engineered transmissive surfaces have been demonstrated for all-optical statistical inference and performing arbitrary linear transformations using passive, free-space optical layers. Here, we introduce a polarization multiplexed diffractive processor to all-optically perform multiple, arbitrarily-selected linear transformations through a single diffractive network trained using deep learning. In this framework, an array of pre-selected linear polarizers is positioned between trainable transmissive diffractive materials that are isotropic, and different target linear transformations (complex-valued) are uniquely assigned to different combinations of input/output polarization states. The transmission layers of this polarization multiplexed diffractive network are trained and optimized via deep learning and error-backpropagation by using thousands of examples of the input/output fields corresponding to each one of the complex-valued linear transformations assigned to different input/output polarization combinations. Our results and analysis reveal that a single diffractive network can successfully approximate and all-optically implement a group of arbitrarily-selected target transformations with a negligible error when the number of trainable diffractive features/neurons (N) approaches N_p x N_i x N_o, where N_i and N_o represent the number of pixels at the input and output fields-of-view, respectively, and N_p refers to the number of unique linear transformations assigned to different input/output polarization combinations. This polarization-multiplexed all-optical diffractive processor can find various applications in optical computing and polarization-based machine vision tasks.