Optical Ising machines: Computation using a network of OPOs - Alireza Marandi

Optical Ising machines are special-purpose computers based on networks of optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) to solve NP-hard Ising problems. Various combinatorial optimization problems in biology, medicine, wireless communications, artificial intelligence and social network that are not easily tractable on conventional computers can be mapped to the Ising problem, and hence the optical Ising machine offers a scalable path for tackling these problems. I will overview a sequence of experiments on development of these machines, from their first demonstration in 2014 [1], to a recent large-scale realization that can be programmed to arbitrary Ising problems [2], and one-to-one comparisons with the D-Wave quantum annealer. I will also discuss the path toward scalable quantum photonic engineering using OPO networks.

[1] A. Marandi et al., Nature Photonics 8 (12), 937-942 (2014).
[2] P. McMahon*, A. Marandi* et al., Science 354 (6312), 614-617 (2016).