Measure multidimensional complex and unknown polarization states in a single shot? All you need is machine learning!

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.05393

Single-shot polarimetry of vector beams by supervised learning

States of light encoding multiple polarizations – vector beams – offer unique capabilities in metrology and communication. However, their practical application is limited by the lack of methods for measuring many polarizations in a scalable and compact way. Here we demonstrate polarimetry of vector beams in a single shot without any polarization optics. We map the beam polarization content into a spatial intensity distribution through multiple light scattering and exploit supervised learning for single-shot measurements of multiple polarizations. The method also allows us to classify beams with an unknown number of polarization modes, a functionality missing in conventional techniques. Our findings enable a fast and compact polarimeter for polarization-structured light, a universal tool that may radically impact optical devices for sensing, imaging, and computing.

Large-scale photonic natural language processing: ask your lasers if the movie is good!

Modern machine learning applications require huge artificial networks demanding in computational power and memory. Light-based platforms promise ultra-fast and energy-efficient hardware, which may help in realizing next-generation data processing devices. However, current photonic networks are limited by the number of input-output nodes that can be processed in a single shot. This restricted network capacity prevents their application to relevant large-scale problems such as natural language processing. Here, we realize a photonic processor with a capacity exceeding 1.5×1010 optical nodes, more than one order of magnitude larger than any previous implementation, which enables photonic large-scale text encoding and classification. By exploiting the full three-dimensional structure of the optical field propagating in free space, we overcome the interpolation threshold and reach the over-parametrized region of machine learning, a condition that allows high-performance natural language processing with a minimal fraction of training points. Our results provide a novel solution to scale-up light-driven computing and open the route to photonic language processing.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.13649

Variational quantum algorithm for Gaussian discrete solitons and their boson sampling

In the context of quantum information, highly nonlinear regimes, such as those supporting solitons, are marginally investigated. We miss general methods for quantum solitons, although they can act as entanglement generators or as self-organized quantum processors. We develop a computational approach that uses a neural network as a variational ansatz for quantum solitons in an array of waveguides. By training the resulting phase-space quantum machine learning model, we find different soliton solutions varying the number of particles and interaction strength. We consider Gaussian states that enable measuring the degree of entanglement and sampling the probability distribution of many-particle events. We also determine the probability of generating particle pairs and unveil that soliton bound states emit correlated pairs. These results may have a role in boson sampling with nonlinear systems and in quantum processors for entangled nonlinear waves

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12379

https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.106.013518

Nonlocality-induced surface localization in Bose-Einstein condensates of light

The ability to create and manipulate strongly correlated quantum many-body states is of central importance to the study of collective phenomena in several condensed-matter systems. In the last decades, a great amount of work has been focused on ultracold atoms in optical lattices, which provide a flexible platform to simulate peculiar phases of matter both for fermionic and bosonic particles. The recent experimental demonstration of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of light in dye-filled microcavities has opened the intriguing possibility to build photonic simulators of solid-state systems, with potential advantages over their atomic counterpart. A distinctive feature of photon BEC is the thermo-optical nature of the effective photon-photon interaction, which is intrinsically nonlocal and can thus induce interactions of arbitrary range. This offers the opportunity to systematically study the collective behavior of many-body systems with tunable interaction range. In this paper, we theoretically study the effect of nonlocal interactions in photon BEC. We first present numerical results of BEC in a double-well potential, and then extend our analysis to a short one-dimensional lattice with open boundaries. By resorting to a numerical procedure inspired by the Newton-Raphson method, we simulate the time-independent Gross-Pitaevskii equation and provide evidence of surface localization induced by nonlocality, where the condensate density is localized at the boundaries of the potential. Our work paves the way toward the realization of synthetic matter with photons, where the interplay between long-range interactions and low dimensionality can lead to the emergence of unexplored nontrivial collective phenomena.

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.105.043318

Quantum Machine Learning course on Github