Enhanced, fully connected 360 000-spin spatial photonic Ising machine
Junze Yao, Rongwei Zhu, Junjie Yu · Physical Review Applied · 2025
The spatial photonic Ising machine (SPIM) is a promising architecture that leverages the scalability and parallelism of photons to solve Ising problems in combinatorial optimization. SPIMs have been held back fundamentally by limited computational accuracy. This study overcomes that limitation through a hybrid approach, integrating aberration correction with a dynamic algorithm to update simultaneously a number of flipped spins, rather than just one. The method demonstrably improves computational accuracy and presents a way for SPIMs to scale to significantly larger systems (order 10${}^{5}$ spins), a milestone on the path to practical application.