arXiv · 2512.21587
Incorporating rank-free coupling and external field via an incoherent modulated spatial photonic Ising machine
Abstract
Spatial photonic Ising machines offer a novel optical platform for optimization and spin-model simulation, but existing diffraction-based schemes rely on auxiliary spins or multiplexing to encode high-rank couplings and external fields, reducing either speed or spin count. We demonstrate an amplitude-only, rank-free spatial photonic Ising machine in which arbitrary Ising Hamiltonians are encoded as Hadamard products on aligned amplitude and binary spatial modulators and read out by a single-pixel intensity measurement. The machine directly programs fully connected 797-spin Ising models with external fields at nearly 9-bit precision and operates at a constant iteration rate of ~200 Hz. By removing zero-valued product terms, the same architecture scales to sparse problems and experimentally solves a Max-Cut instance on a 424,108-vertex Mobius ladder graph. We also observe the phase transition of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model, demonstrating programmable optical simulation beyond low-rank couplings. These results establish amplitude modulation as a scalable route to programmable photonic Ising machines.
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Ze Zheng, Yuegang Li, Hang Xu, Jingzheng Huang, Tailong Xiao, Guihua Zeng. 2025-12-25. Incorporating rank-free coupling and external field via an incoherent modulated spatial photonic Ising machine. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21587
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