A single shot coherent Ising machine based on a network of injection-locked multicore fiber lasers.

Babaeian, Masoud; Nguyen, Dan T; Demir, Veysi; Akbulut, Mehmetcan; Blanche, Pierre-A; Kaneda, Yushi; Guha, Saikat; Neifeld, Mark A et al. · Nat Commun · 2019

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Combinatorial optimization problems over large and complex systems have many applications in social networks, image processing, artificial intelligence, computational biology and a variety of other areas. Finding the optimized solution for such problems in general are usually in non-deterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard complexity class. Some NP-hard problems can be easily mapped to minimizing an Ising energy function. Here, we present an analog all-optical implementation of a coherent Ising machine (CIM) based on a network of injection-locked multicore fiber (MCF) lasers. The Zeeman terms and the mutual couplings appearing in the Ising Hamiltonians are implemented using spatial light modulators (SLMs). As a proof-of-principle, we demonstrate the use of optics to solve several Ising Hamiltonians for up to thirteen nodes. Overall, the average accuracy of the CIM to find the ground state energy was ~90% for 120 trials. The fundamental bottlenecks for the scalability and programmability of the presented CIM are discussed as well.