Abstract Structured beams endowed with topological charges and singularities show great potential for both classical and quantum information encoding. While manipulation of topological charges is well-established, information carriers based on topological invariants governing singularity evolution—optical links and knots—remain underexplored. The fundamental limitation lies in detection bandwidth: resolving singularities behaving like optical darkness through conventional intensity localization demands prohibitive exposure times, thereby constraining the transmission rates. To address this issue, we introduce a neuromorphic approach—Logarithmic Intensity Gradient Handling Technology for Event-based Links-and-knots Formation (LightELF)—which enables microsecond-level asynchronous spatial readout of sparse singularities. By fusing logarithmic gradient sampling with the superoscillating nature of singularities, LightELF reconstructs links and knots without post-processing while achieving orders-of-magnitude data reduction. Moreover, we demonstrate a topological binary signal processing chain integrating a high-throughput transmitter with our neuromorphic detector. This work establishes optical links and knots as viable information carriers, pioneering event sensing in topological photonics and providing a neuromorphic signal framework for optical information processing.
Weng et al. (Mon,) studied this question.