Recently, a team led by Associate Professor Fei Ding from the School of Electronic Science and Technology in the College of Information Science and Technology at EIT Ningbo has made a series of breakthroughs in the fields of polarization-selective diffractive neural networks and multi-degree-of-freedom multiplexed diffractive neural networks based on metasurfaces. The results have been published in Nature Communications and Advanced Materials, and were highlighted on the official website of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

In a significant advancement in polarization-selective diffractive neural networks, Associate Professor Fei Ding collaborated with a team including Professor Xiaofei Zang, Professor Yiming Zhu, and Academician Songlin Zhuang from the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST).  

This research is expected to provide solutions for all-optical computing, secure communication, and privacy protection. The findings were published in Nature Communications on May 14 under the title “Polarization-selective unidirectional and bidirectional diffractive neural networks for information security and sharing.” Ziqing Guo, Ph.D. student, and Dr. Zhiyu Tan from the School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering at USST served as co-first authors. Professor Xiaofei Zang, Professor Yiming Zhu, and Professor Fei Ding are the corresponding authors. Academician Songlin Zhuang provided meticulous guidance for this work.

In another collaborative study, the team led by Associate Professor Fei Ding, together with Academician Songlin Zhuang, Professor Yiming Zhu, and Associate Professor Xiaofei Zang from USST, proposed and experimentally validated a multi-degree-of-freedom diffractive processor. This processor utilizes a metasurface-based approach to integrate polarization, distance, and rotation channels for various inference tasks and information encryption.

The research results were published in Advanced Materials on June 12 under the title “Integrated Polarization, Distance, and Rotation for Multi-DoF Diffractive Processor and Information Encryption.”