Perfect linear optics using silicon photonics

Recently there has been growing interest in using photonics to perform the linear algebra operations of neuromorphic and quantum computing applications, aiming at harnessing silicon photonics’ (SiPho) high-speed and energy-efficiency credentials. Accurately mapping, however, a matrix into optics remains challenging, since state-of-the-art optical architectures are sensitive to fabrication imperfections. This leads to reduced fidelity that degrades as the insertion losses of the optical matrix nodes or the matrix dimensions increase. In this work, we present the experimental deployment of a 4 × 4 coherent crossbar (Xbar) as a silicon chip and validate experimentally its theoretically predicted fidelity restoration credentials. We demonstrate the experimental implementation of 10,000 arbitrary linear transformations achieving a record-high fidelity of 99.997% ± 0.002, limited mainly by the measurement equipment. Our work represents an integrated optical circuit providing almost unity and loss-independent fidelity in the realization of arbitrary matrices, highlighting light’s credentials in resolving complex computations.