Experimental realization of dual task processing with a photonic reservoir computer

We experimentally demonstrate the possibility to process two tasks in parallel with a photonic reservoir computer based on a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) as a physical node with time-delay optical feedback. The two tasks are injected optically by exploiting the polarization dynamics of the VCSEL. We test our reservoir with the very demanding task of nonlinear optical channel equalization as an illustration of the performance of the system and show the recover of two signals simultaneously with an error rate of 0.3% (3%) for a 25 km-fiber distortion (50 km-fiber distortion) at a processing speed of 51.3 Mb/s.