The article says:
The photons travel through a resonant metasurface, where they mingle with a pump beam.
From that, I think it’s suggesting it needs a separate beam of photons to amplify the signal, much like a transistor needs a supply current to amplify the signal it gets.
They also say:
This new tech also captures the visible and non-visible (or infrared) light in one image as you look through the ‘lens.’
Which sounds like it produces an image showing both the IR and visible spectrum in the visible range.
Mind you, re-readind it, most of the article just talks about IR, so I’m not certain what it’s actually doing. It could just be transparent to the visible spectrum. It wouldn’t be much good for driving if it did that though, the windscreen blocks a lot of IR and you’d need IR headlights!
There’s an easier and more reliable way to limit replication; don’t hive them the means to create a small but essential part, and instead load the first probe woth many copies of it and have each replica take a set percentage.
For instance, have the probe able to replicate everything but its CPU, and just load up a rack of them on probe 0. Every time it replicates itself it passes half of its remaining stock to the replica and they both carry on from there.