No Arabic abstract
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.
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 study the complexity of classically sampling from the output distribution of an Ising spin model, which can be implemented naturally in a variety of atomic, molecular, and optical systems. In particular, we construct a specific example of an Ising Hamiltonian that, after time evolution starting from a trivial initial state, produces a particular output configuration with probability very nearly proportional to the square of the permanent of a matrix with arbitrary integer entries. In a similar spirit to BosonSampling, the ability to sample classically from the probability distribution induced by time evolution under this Hamiltonian would imply unlikely complexity theoretic consequences, suggesting that the dynamics of such a spin model cannot be efficiently simulated with a classical computer. Physical Ising spin systems capable of achieving problem-size instances (i.e. qubit numbers) large enough so that classical sampling of the output distribution is classically difficult in practice may be achievable in the near future. Unlike BosonSampling, our current results only imply hardness of exact classical sampling, leaving open the important question of whether a much stronger approximate-sampling hardness result holds in this context. As referenced in a recent paper of Bouland, Mancinska, and Zhang (A. Bouland, L. Mancinska, and X. Zhang, CCC 2016, pp. 28:1-28:33), our result completes the sampling hardness classification of two-qubit commuting Hamiltonians.
We present a framework to prepare superpositions of bit strings, i.e., many-body spin configurations, with deterministic programmable probabilities. The spin configurations are encoded in the degenerate ground states of the lattice-gauge representation of an all-to-all connected Ising spin glass. The ground state manifold is invariant under variations of the gauge degrees of freedom, which take the form of four-body parity constraints. Our framework makes use of these degrees of freedom by individually tuning them to dynamically prepare programmable superpositions. The dynamics combines an adiabatic protocol with controlled diabatic transitions. We derive an effective model that allows one to determine the control parameters efficiently even for large system sizes.
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.