title: Spike latency and response properties of an excitable micropillar laser.
abstract: We present experimental measurements concerning the response of an excitable micropillar laser with saturable absorber to incoherent as well as coherent perturbations. The excitable response is similar to the behavior of spiking neurons but with much faster time scales. It is accompanied by a subnanosecond nonlinear delay that is measured for different bias pump values. This mechanism provides a natural scheme for encoding the strength of an ultrafast stimulus in the response delay of excitable spikes (temporal coding). Moreover, we demonstrate coherent and incoherent perturbations techniques applied to the micropillar with perturbation thresholds in the range of a few femtojoules. Responses to coherent perturbations assess the cascadability of the system. We discuss the physical origin of the responses to single and double perturbations with the help of numerical simulations of the Yamada model and, in particular, unveil possibilities to control the relative refractory period that we recently evidenced in this system. Experimental measurements are compared to both numerical simulations of the Yamada model and analytic expressions obtained in the framework of singular perturbation techniques. This system is thus a good candidate to perform photonic spike processing tasks in the framework of novel neuroinspired computing systems.
authors.affiliation: Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, C2N-Marcoussis, 91460 Marcoussis, France.
authors.forename: F
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Selmi
authors.affiliation: Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, C2N-Marcoussis, 91460 Marcoussis, France.|Université Paris Diderot, 5 rue Thomas-Mann, 75013 Paris, France.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Braive
authors.affiliation: Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, C2N-Marcoussis, 91460 Marcoussis, France.
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Beaudoin
authors.affiliation: Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, C2N-Marcoussis, 91460 Marcoussis, France.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Sagnes
authors.affiliation: Neurophotonics Laboratory, CNRS/Université Paris Descartes, 45, rue des Saints-Pères, 75270 Paris, France.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kuszelewicz
authors.affiliation: Université Libre de Bruxelles, Optique Nonlinéaire Théorique, Campus Plaine C.P. 231, 1050 Bruxelles, Belgium.
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Erneux
authors.affiliation: Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies, CNRS, Univ. Paris-Sud, Université Paris-Saclay, C2N-Marcoussis, 91460 Marcoussis, France.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Barbay