The Taiji microresonator as an unidirectional spiking neuron

Abstract

While biological neurons ensure unidirectional signalling, scalable integrated photonic neurons, such as silicon microresonators, respond the same way regardless of excitation direction due to the Lorentz reciprocity principle. Here, we show that a non-linear Taiji microresonator is a proper optical analogous of a biological neuron showing both a spiking response as well as a direction dependence response.