Impact of phase modulation on the performance of photonic delay-based reservoir computing with semiconductor lasers

Abstract

In photonic reservoir computing, semiconductor lasers with delayed feedback have been used to efficiently solve difficult and time-consuming problems. The injection of data in these systems is often performed optically into the reservoir. Based on simulations, we show that the performance depends heavily on the way that information is encoded in this optical injection signal. In the simulations, we compare various input configurations consisting of Mach-Zehnder modulators and phase modulators for injecting the signal. We observe far better performance in our results, see also [Bauwens et al, Opt. Express 30, 13434 (2022)], on a one-step ahead time-series prediction task when modulating the phase of the injected signal rather than only modulating its amplitude.