Category: Nonlinear Optics

All-Optical Scalable Spatial Coherent Ising Machine

Networks of optical oscillators simulating coupled Ising spins have been recently proposed as a heuristic platform to solve hard optimization problems. These networks, called coherent Ising machines (CIMs), exploit the fact that the collective nonlinear dynamics of coupled oscillators can drive the system close to the global minimum of the classical Ising Hamiltonian, encoded in the coupling matrix of the network. To date, realizations of large-scale CIMs have been demonstrated using hybrid optical-electronic setups, where optical oscillators simulating different spins are subject to electronic feedback mechanisms emulating their mutual interaction. While the optical evolution ensures an ultrafast computation, the electronic coupling represents a bottleneck that causes the computational time to severely depend on the system size. Here, we propose an all-optical scalable CIM with fully programmable coupling. Our setup consists of an optical parametric amplifier with a spatial light modulator (SLM) within the parametric cavity. The spin variables are encoded in the binary phases of the optical wave front of the signal beam at different spatial points, defined by the pixels of the SLM. We first discuss how different coupling topologies can be achieved by different configurations of the SLM, and then benchmark our setup with a numerical simulation that mimics the dynamics of the proposed machine. In our proposal, both the spin dynamics and the coupling are fully performed in parallel, paving the way towards the realization of size-independent ultrafast optical hardware for large-scale computation purposes.

https://journals.aps.org/prapplied/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.16.054022

https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.06737

Boson sampling solitons by quantum machine learning

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12379

We use a neural network variational ansatz to compute Gaussian quantum discrete solitons in an array of waveguides described by the quantum discrete nonlinear Schroedinger equation. By training the quantum machine learning model in the phase space, we find different quantum soliton solutions varying the number of particles and interaction strength. The use of Gaussian states enables measuring the degree of entanglement and the boson sampling patterns. We compute the probability of generating different particle pairs when varying the soliton features and unveil that bound states of discrete solitons emit correlated pairs of photons. These results may have a role in boson sampling experiments with nonlinear systems and in developing quantum processors to generate entangled many-photon nonlinear states.

Deep learning, nonlinear optics, and physical unclonable keys for intrinsic security

https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/nanoph/ahead-of-print/article-10.1515-nanoph-2020-0368/article-10.1515-nanoph-2020-0368.xml

Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are complex physical objects that aim at overcoming the vulnerabilities of traditional cryptographic keys, promising a robust class of security primitives for different applications. Optical PUFs present advantages over traditional electronic realizations, namely, a stronger unclonability, but suffer from problems of reliability and weak unpredictability of the key. We here develop a two-step PUF generation strategy based on deep learning, which associates reliable keys verified against the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) certification standards of true random generators for cryptography. The idea explored in this work is to decouple the design of the PUFs from the key generation and train a neural architecture to learn the mapping algorithm between the key and the PUF. We report experimental results with all-optical PUFs realized in silica aerogels and analyzed a population of 100 generated keys, each of 10,000 bit length. The key generated passed all tests required by the NIST standard, with proportion outcomes well beyond the NIST’s recommended threshold. The two-step key generation strategy studied in this work can be generalized to any PUF based on either optical or electronic implementations. It can help the design of robust PUFs for both secure authentications and encrypted communications.