Ultrasensitive 2D Vermiculite Inorganic Liquid Crystals for Nonlinear Optical Activation.

Journal: ACS nano
Published Date: Jan 6, 2026

Abstract

Optical neural networks (ONNs) have emerged as promising architectures for vision tasks due to their inherent parallelism and potential low energy consumption. Currently, achieving reconfigurable nonlinear optical activation with high responsiveness remains challenging in ONNs. In this study, we propose a reconfigurable configuration utilizing two-dimensional (2D) material-based inorganic liquid crystal (LC) as an optical-to-optical nonlinear activator. The ultrasensitive electro-optical effect of 2D vermiculite (VMT) enables the proposed configuration, where the nonlinear activation is sensitively modulated by a small operational electric field in a range of <0.4 V mm-1, orders of magnitude lower than other LCs. We validate the capability and feasibility of the 2D VMT inorganic LC-based nonlinear optical activator for ONNs through emulation on benchmark data sets for image recognition with accuracy of 99.69, 92.56, and 79.19% for MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10, respectively. This work shows the potential of 2D material inorganic LCs as activators in ONNs, offering promising avenues for future advanced computational applications.

Authors

  • Hefei Xi
    Shenzhen Geim Graphene Center, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Advanced Layered Materials for Value-added Applications, Key Laboratory of Electrocatalytic Materials and Green Hydrogen Technology of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, Institute of Materials Research, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, P.R China.
  • Ziyang Huang
    College of Computer and Data Science, Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China.
  • Jiarong Liu
    Shenzhen Geim Graphene Center, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Advanced Layered Materials for Value-added Applications, Key Laboratory of Electrocatalytic Materials and Green Hydrogen Technology of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, Institute of Materials Research, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, P.R China.
  • Xin Kang
    Sports Medicine Center, Honghui Hospital, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, 710054, China.
  • Shengkai Chang
    Shenzhen Geim Graphene Center, Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Advanced Layered Materials for Value-added Applications, Key Laboratory of Electrocatalytic Materials and Green Hydrogen Technology of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, Institute of Materials Research, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, P.R China.
  • Yujie Sun
    State Key Laboratory of Membrane Biology, Biodynamic Optical Imaging Center, School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China.
  • Rongjie Zhang
    Shenzhen Geim Graphene Center, Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute and Institute of Materials Research, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, People's Republic of China.
  • Bilu Liu
    Shenzhen Geim Graphene Center, Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute and Institute of Materials Research, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, People's Republic of China.

Keywords

No keywords available for this article.

External Resources

Popular Topics
Recent Journals