Quantum nanostructures route light within optical neural networks, drastically lowering power consumption in deep learning workloads

https://phys.org/news/2026-09-tiny-quantum-nanostructures-ai-energy.html

"optical neural networks struggle with optical nonlinearity, required for complex pattern recognition... photons resist interacting with each other, necessitating impractically high laser power to induce nonlinearity... overcome integrating quantum nanostructure surrounding quantum emitter (vacancy color center) into neural network, reducing power consumption 7 orders of magnitude... scalable, low-power AI built on existing diamond-based quantum photonics"