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Emerging applications of photonics in computing, sensing, and security increasingly demand complex input–output behaviors, including highly nonlinear transformations of optical signals. Traditional photonic systems rely on highly structured components with symmetric geometries and low-entropy modal responses to achieve predictable and analytically describable behavior. To achieve expressive functionality, this paradigm often requires large networks of fabrication-sensitive interferometers or resonators and substantial hardware error correction to restore deterministic operation. Here, we demonstrate an alternative paradigm rooted in low-symmetry, disordered integrated photonic circuits, which provide intrinsically enhanced modal diversity and spectral complexity, enabling highly nonlinear transformations of input signals into information-rich outputs. Our devices, physically unclonable moiré quasicrystal interferometers integrated on a silicon photonics platform, exhibit aperiodic and reconfigurable spectral responses and are characterized by analyticity breaking and erasable mutual information. Using dynamic thermo-optic control to drive their complex spectral dynamics, we demonstrate that these devices function as reconfigurable physical unclonable functions (rPUFs). We also highlight their ability to perform high-dimensional input–output transformations, emulating reservoir-inspired information processing in a compact photonic platform. This work bridges the gap between engineered and natural complexity in photonic systems, revealing new opportunities for scalable, energy-efficient, and information-dense optoelectronics with applications in secure communications, hardware security, advanced sensing, and optical information processing. Our results establish low-symmetry integrated photonics as a powerful resource for complex signal manipulation in photonic systems.
Tarik et al. (Thu,) studied this question.