Plasmonic Nonlinear Metasurfaces for Building an Optical Spiking Neuron

Resonant periodic gold nanorod array is utilized as a saturable absorber to achieve a novel excitable fiber laser, which shows properties of a leaky integrated-and-fire (LIF) neuron, including spike generation, pulse encoding, and nonlinear response. We prove that saturable plasmonic metasurfaces could be promising candidates for optical nonlinearity in neuromorphic computing.