Bacteriorhodopsin Opto-Electronic Synapses

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in artificial neural networks, and several optical implementations have been investigated [1]. Neural networks are intrinsically parallel computers, and optics can provide the massive parallelism and interconnectivity they require. The key components of neural networks are the synapses between the neurons, which are the locus of signal processing, learning, and memory. Bacteriorhodopsin (BR) has photochromic properties which will enable one to construct functionally complete synapses in the form of a thin-film optically-addressed spatial light modulator. Here we present measurements of properties of bacteriorhodopsin relevant to synaptic functions.