Understanding light–matter interaction lies at the core of our ability to harness physical effects and to translate them into new capabilities realized in modern integrated photonics platforms. Here, we present the design and characterization of optofluidic components in an integrated photonics platform and computationally predict a series of physical effects that rely on thermocapillary-driven interaction between waveguide modes and topography changes of optically thin liquid dielectric film. Our results indicate that this coupling introduces substantial self-induced phase change and transmittance change in a single channel waveguide, transmittance through the Bragg grating waveguide, and nonlocal interaction between adjacent waveguides. We then employ the self-induced effects together with the inherent built-in finite relaxation time of the liquid film, to demonstrate that the light-driven deformation can serve as a reservoir computer capable of performing digital and analog tasks, where the gas–liquid interface operates both as a nonlinear actuator and as an optical memory element.

Optical metamaterials and metasurfaces, which emerged in the course of the last few decades, have revolutionized our understanding of light and light–matter interaction. While solid materials are naturally employed as key building elements for construction of optical metamaterials mainly due to their structural stability, practically no attention was given to study of liquid-made optical two-dimensional (2-D) metasurfaces and the underlying interaction regimes between surface optical modes and liquids. We theoretically demonstrate that surface plasmon polaritons and slab waveguide modes that propagate within a thin liquid dielectric film trigger optical self-induced interaction facilitated by surface tension effects, which leads to the formation of 2-D optical liquid-made lattices/metasurfaces with tunable symmetry and can be leveraged for tuning of lasing modes. Furthermore, we show that the symmetry breaking of the 2-D optical liquid lattice leads to phase transition and tuning of its topological properties, which allows the formation, destruction, and movement of Dirac-points in the k-space. Our results indicate that optical liquid lattices support extremely low lasing threshold relative to solid dielectric films and have the potential to serve as configurable analogous computation platform.