Although vast amounts of information are conveyed by photons in opticalfibers, the majority of data processing is performed electronically, creatingthe infamous 'information bottleneck' and consuming energy at an increasinglyunsustainable rate. The potential for photonic devices to directly manipulatelight remains unfulfilled due largely to a lack of materials with strong, fastoptical nonlinearities. In this paper, we show that small-signal amplifier,summator and invertor functions for optical signals may be realized using afour-port device that exploits the coherent interaction of beams on a planarplasmonic metamaterial, assuming no intrinsic nonlinearity. The redistributionof energy among ports can be coherently controlled at the single photon level,with THz bandwidth and without introducing signal distortion, therebypresenting powerful opportunities for novel optical data processingarchitectures, complexity oracles and the locally coherent networks that arebecoming part of the mainstream telecommunications agenda.
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