Scalable spin-glass optical simulator

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optical spin-glass simulator that leverages spatial light modulation and multiple scattering to efficiently compute ground states of large, complex spin systems, demonstrating an optical advantage over traditional methods.

Contribution

The authors develop and experimentally demonstrate a scalable optical platform for simulating spin-glass problems, utilizing disordered media to accelerate computation.

Findings

Optical method scales favorably with problem size.

Achieves faster ground state computation than conventional methods.

Demonstrates potential for large-scale, coherent optical computing.

Abstract

Many developments in science and engineering depend on tackling complex optimizations on large scales. The challenge motivates intense search for specific computing hardware that takes advantage from quantum features, nonlinear dynamics, or photonics. A paradigmatic optimization problem is finding low-energy states in classical spin systems with fully-random interactions. To date no alternative computing platform can address such spin-glass problems on a large scale. Here we propose and realize an optical scalable spin-glass simulator based on spatial light modulation and multiple light scattering. By tailoring optical transmission through a disordered medium, we optically accelerate the computation of the ground state of large spin networks with all-to-all random couplings. Scaling of the operation time with the problem size demonstrates optical advantage over conventional computing. Our results point out optical vector-matrix multiplication as a tool for spin-glass problems and provide a general route towards large-scale computing that exploits speed, parallelism and coherence of light.