Drive‐Efficient GHz‐Rate Binary‐State Updates Enabled by VCSEL Polarization Switching

ABSTRACT Photonic computing offers a route beyond conventional electronic processors by exploiting the bandwidth, parallelism, and low‐latency operation of light, which is especially attractive for iterative architectures, such as photonic Ising machines. A central requirement of these architectures is a compact physical node that can reliably update and read out an optical state at GHz rates. To address this challenge, electrically driven polarization switching in vertical‐cavity surface‐emitting lasers (VCSELs) is experimentally investigated, and the switching point is shown to provide a GHz‐scale nonlinear transduction regime for polarization‐resolved optical‐state modulation. At this operating point, selecting a single linear polarization channel converts the current‐driven redistribution of optical power into a larger detected optical modulation amplitude. Using this readout scheme, the polarization‐selected optical modulation amplitude is enhanced by approximately 10 dB in the measured frequency response, and a 1.25 Gbps eye diagram is improved, with the eye amplitude increasing from 978.0 to 1152.5 and the eye height from 705.0 to 768.0 . These results establish electrically driven VCSEL polarization switching as a compact and scalable route to efficient GHz‐rate binary‐state updates for polarization‐encoded photonic computing.