Experimental Observation of Phase Transitions in Spatial Photonic Ising Machine

Yisheng Fang, Junyi Huang, and Zhichao Ruan

Statistical spin dynamics plays a key role in understanding the working principle for novel optical Ising machines. Here, we propose the gauge transformation for a spatial photonic Ising machine, where a single spatial phase modulator simultaneously encodes spin configurations and programs interaction strengths. Using gauge transformation, we experimentally evaluate the phase diagram of a high-dimensional spin-glass equilibrium system with 100 fully connected spins. We observe the presence of paramagnetic, ferromagnetic, and spin-glass phases and determine the critical temperature $T_c$ and the critical probability $p_c$ of the phase transitions, which agree well with the mean-field theory predictions. Thus, the approximation of the mean-field model is experimentally verified in the spatial photonic Ising machine. Furthermore, we discuss the phase transition in parallel with solving combinatorial optimization problems during the cooling process and identify that the spatial photonic Ising machine is robust with sufficient many-spin interactions even when the system is associated with optical aberrations and measurement uncertainty.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 043902

The published article is available at https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.043902