No Arabic abstract
Many tasks in our modern life, such as planning an efficient travel, image processing and optimizing integrated circuit design, are modeled as complex combinatorial optimization problems with binary variables. Such problems can be mapped to finding a ground state of the Ising Hamiltonian, thus various physical systems have been studied to emulate and solve this Ising problem. Recently, networks of mutually injected optical oscillators, called coherent Ising machines, have been developed as promising solvers for the problem, benefiting from programmability, scalability and room temperature operation. Here, we report a 16-bit coherent Ising machine based on a network of time-division-multiplexed femtosecond degenerate optical parametric oscillators. The system experimentally gives more than 99.6 % of success rates for one-dimensional Ising ring and nondeterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard instances. The experimental and numerical results indicate that gradual pumping of the network combined with multiple spectral and temporal modes of the femtosecond pulses can improve the computational performance of the Ising machine, offering a new path for tackling larger and more complex instances.
We show that the nonlinear stochastic dynamics of a measurement-feedback-based coherent Ising machine (MFB-CIM) in the presence of quantum noise can be exploited to sample degenerate ground and low-energy spin configurations of the Ising model. We formulate a general discrete-time Gaussian-state model of the MFB-CIM which faithfully captures the nonlinear dynamics present at and above system threshold. This model overcomes the limitations of both mean-field models, which neglect quantum noise, and continuous-time models, which assume long photon lifetimes. Numerical simulations of our model show that when the MFB-CIM is operated in a quantum-noise-dominated regime with short photon lifetimes (i.e., low cavity finesse), homodyne monitoring of the system can efficiently produce samples of low-energy Ising spin configurations, requiring many fewer roundtrips to sample than suggested by established high-finesse, continuous-time models. We find that sampling performance is robust to, or even improved by, turning off or altogether reversing the sign of the parametric drive, but performance is critically reduced in the absence of optical nonlinearity. For the class of MAX-CUT problems with binary-signed edge weights, the number of roundtrips sufficient to fully sample all spin configurations up to the first-excited Ising energy, including all degeneracies, scales as $1.08^N$. At a problem size of $N = 100$ with a few dozen (median of 20) such desired configurations per instance, we have found median sufficient sampling times of $6times10^6$ roundtrips; in an experimental implementation of an MFB-CIM with a 10 GHz repetition rate, this corresponds to a wall-clock sampling time of 0.6 ms.
Finding the ground states of the Ising Hamiltonian [1] maps to various combinatorial optimization problems in biology, medicine, wireless communications, artificial intelligence, and social network. So far no efficient classical and quantum algorithm is known for these problems, and intensive research is focused on creating physical systems - Ising machines - capable of finding the absolute or approximate ground states of the Ising Hamiltonian [2-6]. Here we report a novel Ising machine using a network of degenerate optical parametric oscillators (OPOs). Spins are represented with above-threshold binary phases of the OPOs and the Ising couplings are realized by mutual injections [7]. The network is implemented in a single OPO ring cavity with multiple trains of femtosecond pulses and configurable mutual couplings, and operates at room temperature. We programed the smallest non-deterministic polynomial time (NP)- hard Ising problem on the machine, and in 1000 runs of the machine no computational error was detected.
Combinatorial optimization problems are computationally hard in general, but they are ubiquitous in our modern life. A coherent Ising machine (CIM) based on a multiple-pulse degenerate optical parametric oscillator (DOPO) is an alternative approach to solve these problems by a specialized physical computing system. To evaluate its potential performance, computational experiments are performed on maximum cut (MAX-CUT) problems against traditional algorithms such as semidefinite programming relaxation of Goemans-Williamson and simulated annealing by Kirkpatrick, et al. The numerical results empirically suggest that the almost constant computation time is required to obtain the reasonably accurate solutions of MAX-CUT problems on a CIM with the number of vertices up to $2 times 10^4$ and the number of edges up to $10^8$.
Maximally entangled photon pairs with a spatial degree of freedom is a potential way for realizing high-capacity quantum computing and communication. However, methods to generate such entangled states with high quality, high brightness, and good controllability are needed. Here, a scheme is experimentally demonstrated that generates spatially maximally entangled photon pairs with an orbital angular momentum degree of freedom via spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear crystal. Compared with existing methods using post-selection, the technique can directly modulate the spatial spectrum of down-converted photon pairs by engineering the input pump beam. In addition, the relative phase between spatially entangled photon pairs can be easily manipulated by preparing the relative phase of input pump states.
The need for solving optimization problems is prevalent in a wide range of physical applications, including neuroscience, network design, biological systems, socio-economics, and chemical reactions. Many of these are classified as non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard and thus become intractable to solve as the system scales to a large number of elements. Recent research advances in photonics have sparked interest in using a network of coupled degenerate optical parametric oscillators (DOPOs) to effectively find the ground state of the Ising Hamiltonian, which can be used to solve other combinatorial optimization problems through polynomial-time mapping. Here, using the nanophotonic silicon-nitride platform, we propose a network of on-chip spatial-multiplexed DOPOs for the realization of a photonic coherent Ising machine. We demonstrate the generation and coupling of two microresonator-based DOPOs on a single chip. Through a reconfigurable phase link, we achieve both in-phase and out-of-phase operation, which can be deterministically achieved at a fast regeneration speed of 400 kHz with a large phase tolerance. Our work provides the critical building blocks towards the realization of a chip-scale photonic Ising machine.