Sylvain Barbay

We will present experimental and theoretical results on the neuromimetic dynamics of a micropillar laser with integrated saturable absorber. This microlaser has been shown to display ultrafast excitable (spiking) behaviour with an absolute and a relative refractory period, similarly to biological neurons but with at least 6 orders of magnitude faster response. We show basic computational functionalities with a single neuron such as temporal summation and memory operation. These results pave the way to the realization of more complex building blocks for integrated processing with neuro-inspired optical systems.