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Nature Communications

A poor man’s coherent Ising machine based on opto-electronic feedback systems for solving optimization problems

Fabian Böhm, Guy Verschaffelt, Guy Van der Sande

Published Aug 8, 2019• 210 citations

Abstract

Coherent Ising machines (CIMs) constitute a promising approach to solve computationally hard optimization problems by mapping them to ground state searches of the Ising model and implementing them with optical artificial spin-networks. However, while CIMs promise speed-ups over conventional digital computers, they are still challenging to build and operate. Here, we propose and test a concept for a fully programmable CIM, which is based on opto-electronic oscillators subjected to self-feedback. Contrary to current CIM designs, the artificial spins are generated in a feedback induced bifurcation and encoded in the intensity of coherent states. This removes the necessity for nonlinear optical processes or large external cavities and offers significant advantages regarding stability, size and cost. We demonstrate a compact setup for solving MAXCUT optimization problems on regular and frustrated graphs with 100 spins and can report similar or better performance compared to CIMs based on degenerate optical parametric oscillators.

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11484-3

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The analysis and optimization of complex systems can be reduced to mathematical problems collectively known as combinatorial optimization. Many such problems can be mapped onto ground-state search problems of the Ising model, and various artificial spin systems are now emerging as promising approaches. However, physical Ising machines have suffered from limited numbers of spin-spin couplings because of implementations based on localized spins, resulting in severe scalability problems. We report a 2000-spin network with all-to-all spin-spin couplings. Using a measurement and feedback scheme, we coupled time-multiplexed degenerate optical parametric oscillators to implement maximum cut problems on arbitrary graph topologies with up to 2000 nodes. Our coherent Ising machine outperformed simulated annealing in terms of accuracy and computation time for a 2000-node complete graph.

Coherent Ising machines (CIMs) are increasingly anticipated as a new computer that can solve combinatorial optimization problems. CIMs use degenerate optical parametric oscillator pulses as artificial spins. We constructed a 100,512-spin coherent Ising machine, the world's largest. Our CIM can find good solutions to maximum cut problems of 100,000-node graphs ~1000 times faster than simulated annealing. Furthermore, it provides both very good scores and a broad distribution when we operate it near the phase transition point.

We report a coherent Ising machine (CIM), which is a network of degenerate optical parametric oscillators for simulating the Ising model. Using a long-distance fiber cavity that includes a telecom-band phase sensitive amplifier, we generated large number of degenerate optical parametric oscillator (DOPO) pulses multiplexed in time domain, which represent the Ising spins. By using a measurement and feedback scheme, we could implement all-to-all coupling among 2048 DOPOs. We experimentally confirmed that the CIM could find solutions to maximum cut problems for graphs with as many as 2000 nodes.

As a solver for non-deterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard combinatorial optimization problems, the coherent Ising machine (CIM) is in the early stages of research, and the potential of this innovative physical system will be developed. Here, we propose a speed-up coherent Ising machine with a squeezed feedback system, which we call S-CIM. We couple squeezed feedback pulses generated by the squeezed feedback system into the degenerate optical parametric oscillator (DOPO) network. Simulations indicate that quantum inseparability of the coupled DOPO network is further enhanced during the whole optimization process, and quantum fluctuations are significantly smaller around the oscillation threshold. Computation experiments are performed on MAX-CUT problems of order between 4 and 20000. Numerical results demonstrate that S-CIM increases the optimal normalized output by 2.27% and significantly reduces the optimal computation time by 75.12%.