Optical Communication among Oscillatory Reactions and Photo-Excitable Systems: how UV and Visible Radiation can Synchronize Artificial Neuron Models

Neuromorphic engineering promises to have a revolutionary impact in our societies. A strategy to develop artificial neurons (ANs) is to use oscillatory and excitable chemical systems. Herein, we use UV and visible radiation as both excitatory and inhibitory signals for the communication among oscillatory reactions, such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky and the chemiluminescent Orban transformations, and photo-excitable photochromic and fluorescent species. We present the experimental results and the simulations regarding pairs of ANs communicating by either one or two optical signals, and triads of ANs arranged in both feed-forward and recurrent networks. We find that the ANs, powered by the energy of electromagnetic radiation and/or chemically, can give rise to the emergent properties of in-phase, out-of-phase, anti-phase synchronizations and phase-locking, dynamically mimicking the communication among real neurons.