Neuromorphic computing with energy efficient quantum materials*

Neuromorphic computing has been proposed as a solution for society's exponentially growing need for energy efficient computation. In the era of artificial intelligence, neuromorphic computing aims to provide a hardware analog for a human brain's capacity for memory and computation. One possible energy-efficient platform for this is the quantum phenomena in perovskite nickelates to simulate neurons, synapses and an overall interconnected network with reconfigurable synaptic plasticity. The technology for such aspirations relies on two former accomplishments. First, hydrogenation of rare earth nickelates, which has been linked to significant magnification of the material's local resistivity. Second, focused helium ion modification, which was shown to effectively suppress local metal-insulator transitions (MIT). Intentional coupling of these two features opens up the opportunity to design a synapse-like unit on an epitaxially grown nickelate thin film, with synthetically implemented excitatory and inhibitory behaviors required for neuron-synapse interactions. Therefore, a complex network of such units is hypothesized to function as a trainable, self sustained neural network, with some units inhibiting, while others facilitating the flow of information.