Super-resolution diffractive neural network for all-optical direction of arrival estimation beyond diffraction limits

Wireless sensing of the wave propagation direction from radio sources lays the foundation for communication, radar, navigation, etc. However, the existing signal processing paradigm for the direction of arrival estimation requires the radio frequency electronic circuit to demodulate and sample the multichannel baseband signals followed by a complicated computing process, which places the fundamental limit on its sensing speed and energy efficiency. Here, we propose the super-resolution diffractive neural networks (S-DNN) to process electromagnetic (EM) waves directly for the DOA estimation at the speed of light. The multilayer meta-structures of S-DNN generate super-oscillatory angular responses in local angular regions that can perform the all-optical DOA estimation with angular resolutions beyond the diffraction limit. The spatial-temporal multiplexing of passive and reconfigurable S-DNNs is utilized to achieve high-resolution DOA estimation over a wide field of view. The S-DNN is validated for the DOA estimation of multiple radio sources over 5 GHz frequency bandwidth with estimation latency over two to four orders of magnitude lower than the state-of-the-art commercial devices in principle. The results achieve the angular resolution over an order of magnitude, experimentally demonstrated with four times, higher than diffraction-limited resolution. We also apply S-DNN's edge computing capability, assisted by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, for extremely low-latency integrated sensing and communication with low power consumption. Our work is a significant step towards utilizing photonic computing processors to facilitate various wireless sensing and communication tasks with advantages in both computing paradigms and performance over electronic computing.