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Optical Computing

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science

Definition of the Subject

An optical computer is a physical information processing device that uses photons to transport data from one memory location to another, and processes the data while it is in this form. In contrast, a conventional digital electronic computer uses electric fields (traveling along conductive paths) for this task. The optical data paths in an optical computer are effected by refraction (such as the action of a lens) or reflection (such as the action of a mirror). A principal advantage of an optical data path over an electrical data path is that optical data paths can intersect and even completely overlap without corrupting the data in either path. Optical computers make use of this property to efficiently transform the optically-encoded data from one representation to another, for example, to shuffle or reverse the order of an array of parallel paths, or to convolve the data in several arrays of parallel paths. Other advantages of optical computers include...

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Abbreviations

Coherent light:

Light of a narrow band of wavelengths (temporally coherent), and a light beam whose phase is approximately constant over its cross sectional area (spatial coherence). For example, coherent light can be produced by a laser.

Incoherent light:

Light which is not spatially coherent and not temporally coherent. For example, incoherent light is produced by a conventional light bulb.

Source:

A device for generating light.

Spatial light modulator (SLM):

A device that imposes some form of spatially-varying modulation on a beam of light. An SLM may modulate the intensity, phase, or both, of the light.

Detector:

A device for sensing light.

Continuous space machine (CSM):

A general optical model of computation that is defined in Sect. “Continuous Space Machine (CSM)”.

Parallel computation thesis:

This thesis states that parallel time corresponds, within a polynomial, to sequential space, for reasonable parallel and sequential machines [29,52,74,98,126].

P, NP, PSPACE, NC:

Complexity classes , these classes are respectively defined as the set of problems solvable on polynomial time deterministic Turing machines ; polynomial time nondeterministic Turing machines; polynomial space Turing machines; and parallel computers that use polylogarithmic time and polynomial hardware [97].

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Acknowledgments

DW thanks J. Paul Gibson and Cris Moore for interesting discussions. DW acknowledges Junta de Andalucia grant TIC-581, Science Foundation Ireland grant number 04/IN3/1524, and Irish Research Council for Science Engineering and Technology grant number PD/2004/33. TN acknowledges support from the European Commission through a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

    Damien Woods

  2. Department of Computer Science, National University of Ireland, Maynooth County Kildare, Ireland

    Thomas J. Naughton

  3. Oulu Southern Institute, University of Oulu, RFMedia Laboratory, Ylivieska, Finland

    Thomas J. Naughton

  4. Department of Computer Sience and Artificial Intelligence, University if Seville, Seville, Spain

    Damien Woods

Authors
  1. Thomas J. Naughton
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  2. Damien Woods
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. RAMTECH LIMITED, 122 Escalle Lane, Larkspur, CA, 94939, USA

    Robert A. Meyers Ph. D. (Editor-in-Chief) (Editor-in-Chief)

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© 2009 Springer-Verlag

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Naughton, T.J., Woods, D. (2009). Optical Computing. In: Meyers, R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-30440-3_377

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