An optical Ising spin glass simulator with tuneable short range couplings

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to control interaction lengths in optical Ising spin glass simulators using transmission matrix knowledge and diffusers, enabling programmable couplings and studying replica symmetry breaking.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to programmably control spin couplings in large-scale optical Ising models using transmission matrix techniques.

Findings

Controlled interaction length between spins achieved

Observation of replica-to-replica fluctuations

Analogy to replica symmetry breaking demonstrated

Abstract

Non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) problems are ubiquitous in almost every field of study. Recently, all-optical approaches have been explored for solving classic NP problems based on the spin-glass Ising Hamiltonian. However, obtaining programmable spin-couplings in large-scale optical Ising simulators, on the other hand, remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate control of the interaction length between user-defined parts of a fully-connected Ising system. This is achieved by exploiting the knowledge of the transmission matrix of a random medium and by using diffusers of various thickness. Finally, we exploit our spin-coupling control to observe replica-to-replica fluctuations and its analogy to standard replica symmetry breaking.