Enhanced performance of a reservoir computer using polarization dynamics in VCSELs

We analyze the performance of a reservoir computer based on time-delay feedback and optical injection, which is drawing benefits from the high-speed polarization dynamics of a vertical cavity surface emitting laser. We show that such a system has high computation performance and yields deeper memory than an existing single-mode laser-based reservoir computer. Performance is demonstrated on several benchmarking tasks. In particular, the error rate is an order of magnitude smaller when performing channel equalization. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America