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Machine‐learning‐based optimization techniques are widely used for designing complex materials. However, an efficient search for the complex systems, where a combinatorial explosion occurs in the materials search space, is still challenging. Core–shell nanoparticles (CSNPs) are an example of a complex system with a high degree of freedom owing to their complicated structure and multiple constituent materials. In this study, a new black box optimization technique is developed. In this method, the structure of the CSNPs is optimized using an Ising machine and their constituent materials are selected using Bayesian optimization with the optical properties of the materials as the "descriptors". Aiming for applications to i‐line photolithography, the authors search for CSNPs that are transparent to ultraviolet light of wavelength 355–375 nm and opaque to visible light of wavelength 400–830 nm. The transmittance spectra of the nanoparticles are obtained using a Mie theory calculator. The proposed nanoparticles with the best optical properties have a multilayered structure with a radius of approximately 40 nm and an outer shell composed of either Mg or Pb. The results indicate that a combination of various optimization techniques is more efficient in discovering the better complex materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce a method for solving a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) with the two-way one-hot constraints by dividing the QUBO into parts and solving it with an Ising machine. The one-hot constraint is a constraint condition in that only one binary variable takes the value one for a set of multiple binary variables. The two-way one-hot constraint imposes one-hot constraint conditions on every row and every column of a two-dimensional array of binary variables with equal numbers of rows and columns. For example, traveling salesman problems (TSPs) have two-way one-hot constraints. We propose two methods to solve a TSP by dividing the cities into clusters based on information in the QUBO matrix. The proposed methods decompose cities into clusters and solve TSPs for each cluster. We solve TSPs such that the cities are distributed in clusters and compare the results of the two proposed methods with the results of solving the problem without partitioning. The results show that the proposed methods are robust to the coefficient parameters in the Hamiltonian of QUBO and can obtain a solution closer to the optimal solution when solving the problem without partitioning is hard. We also discuss the application of the methods proposed in the TSPs to the quadratic assignment problems and to the problems of ordering things.

Machine‐learning‐based optimization techniques are widely used for designing complex materials. However, an efficient search for the complex systems, where a combinatorial explosion occurs in the materials search space, is still challenging. Core–shell nanoparticles (CSNPs) are an example of a complex system with a high degree of freedom owing to their complicated structure and multiple constituent materials. In this study, a new black box optimization technique is developed. In this method, the structure of the CSNPs is optimized using an Ising machine and their constituent materials are selected using Bayesian optimization with the optical properties of the materials as the “descriptors”. Aiming for applications to i‐line photolithography, the authors search for CSNPs that are transparent to ultraviolet light of wavelength 355–375 nm and opaque to visible light of wavelength 400–830 nm. The transmittance spectra of the nanoparticles are obtained using a Mie theory calculator. The proposed nanoparticles with the best optical properties have a multilayered structure with a radius of approximately 40 nm and an outer shell composed of either Mg or Pb. The results indicate that a combination of various optimization techniques is more efficient in discovering the better complex materials.

In this article we present a concrete design for a probabilistic (p-) computer based on a network of p-bits, robust classical entities fluctuating between -1 and +1, with probabilities that are controlled through an input constructed from the outputs of other p-bits. The architecture of this probabilistic computer is similar to a stochastic neural network with the p-bit playing the role of a binary stochastic neuron, but with one key difference: there is no sequencer used to enforce an ordering of p-bit updates, as is typically required. Instead, we explore sequencerless designs where all p-bits are allowed to flip autonomously and demonstrate that such designs can allow ultrafast operation unconstrained by available clock speeds without compromising the solution's fidelity. Based on experimental results from a hardware benchmark of the autonomous design and benchmarked device models, we project that a nanomagnetic implementation can scale to achieve petaflips per second with millions of neurons. A key contribution of this article is the focus on a hardware metric - flips per second - as a problem and substrate-independent figure-of-merit for an emerging class of hardware annealers known as Ising Machines. Much like the shrinking feature sizes of transistors that have continually driven Moore's Law, we believe that flips per second can be continually improved in later technology generations of a wide class of probabilistic, domain specific hardware.

In this article we present a concrete design for a probabilistic (p-) computer based on a network of p-bits, robust classical entities fluctuating between -1 and +1, with probabilities that are controlled through an input constructed from the outputs of other p-bits. The architecture of this probabilistic computer is similar to a stochastic neural network with the p-bit playing the role of a binary stochastic neuron, but with one key difference: there is no sequencer used to enforce an ordering of p-bit updates, as is typically required. Instead, we explore sequencerless designs where all p-bits are allowed to flip autonomously and demonstrate that such designs can allow ultrafast operation unconstrained by available clock speeds without compromising the solution's fidelity. Based on experimental results from a hardware benchmark of the autonomous design and benchmarked device models, we project that a nanomagnetic implementation can scale to achieve petaflips per second with millions of neurons. A key contribution of this article is the focus on a hardware metric - flips per second - as a problem and substrate-independent figure-of-merit for an emerging class of hardware annealers known as Ising Machines. Much like the shrinking feature sizes of transistors that have continually driven Moore's Law, we believe that flips per second can be continually improved in later technology generations of a wide class of probabilistic, domain specific hardware.

The primary objective of this paper is to present an exact and general procedure for mapping any sequence of quantum gates onto a network of probabilistic p-bits which can take on one of two values 0 and 1. The first $n$ p-bits represent the input qubits, while the other p-bits represent the qubits after the application of successive gating operations. We can view this structure as a Boltzmann machine whose states each represent a Feynman path leading from an initial configuration of qubits to a final configuration. Each such path has a complex amplitude $\psi $ which can be associated with a complex energy. The real part of this energy can be used to generate samples of Feynman paths in the usual way, while the imaginary part is accounted for by treating the samples as complex entities, unlike ordinary Boltzmann machines where samples are positive. Quantum gates often have purely imaginary energy functions for which all configurations have the same probability and one cannot take advantage of sampling techniques. Typically this would require us to collect $2^{nd}$ samples which would severely limit its utility. However, if we can use suitable transformations to introduce a real part in the energy function then powerful sampling algorithms like Gibbs sampling can be harnessed to get acceptable results with far fewer samples and perhaps even escape the exponential scaling with $nd$ . This algorithmic acceleration can then be supplemented with special-purpose hardware accelerators like Ising Machines which can obtain a very large number of samples per second through a combination of massive parallelism, pipelining, and clockless mixed-signal operation made possible by codesigning circuits and architectures to match the algorithm. Our results for mapping an arbitrary quantum circuit to a Boltzmann machine with a complex energy function should help push the boundaries of the simulability of quantum circuits with probabilistic resources and compare them with NISQ-era quantum computers.

Ising machines are novel computing devices for the energy minimization of Ising models. These combinatorial optimization problems are of paramount importance for science and technology, but remain difficult to tackle on large scale by conventional electronics. Recently, various photonics-based Ising machines demonstrated fast computing of a Ising ground state by data processing through multiple temporal or spatial optical channels. Experimental noise acts as a detrimental effect in many of these devices. On the contrary, here we demonstrate that an optimal noise level enhances the performance of spatial-photonic Ising machines on frustrated spin problems. By controlling the error rate at the detection, we introduce a noisy-feedback mechanism in an Ising machine based on spatial light modulation. We investigate the device performance on systems with hundreds of individually-addressable spins with all-to-all couplings and we found an increased success probability at a specific noise level. The optimal noise amplitude depends on graph properties and size, thus indicating an additional tunable parameter helpful in exploring complex energy landscapes and in avoiding getting stuck in local minima. Our experimental results identify noise as a potentially valuable resource for optical computing. This concept, which also holds in different nanophotonic neural networks, may be crucial in developing novel hardware with optics-enabled parallel architecture for large-scale optimizations.

In this work, we experimentally demonstrate an integrated circuit (IC) of 30 relaxation oscillators with reconfigurable capacitive coupling to solve the NP-Hard maximum cut (Max-Cut) problem. We show that under the influence of an external second-harmonic injection signal, the oscillator phases exhibit a bipartition that can be used to calculate a high-quality approximate Max-Cut solution. Leveraging the all-to-all reconfigurable coupling architecture, we experimentally evaluate the computational properties of the oscillators using randomly generated graph instances of varying size and edge density (η). Furthermore, comparing the Max-Cut solutions with the optimal values, we show that the oscillators (after simple postprocessing) produce a Max-Cut that is within 99% of the optimal value in 28 of the 36 measured graphs; importantly, the oscillators are particularly effective in dense graphs with the Max-Cut being optimal in seven out of nine measured graphs with η = 0.8. Our work marks a step toward creating an efficient, room-temperature-compatible non-Boolean hardware-based solver for hard combinatorial optimization problems.

In this article we present a concrete design for a probabilistic (p-) computer based on a network of p-bits, robust classical entities fluctuating between -1 and +1, with probabilities that are controlled through an input constructed from the outputs of other p-bits. The architecture of this probabilistic computer is similar to a stochastic neural network with the p-bit playing the role of a binary stochastic neuron, but with one key difference: there is no sequencer used to enforce an ordering of p-bit updates, as is typically required. Instead, we explore sequencerless designs where all p-bits are allowed to flip autonomously and demonstrate that such designs can allow ultrafast operation unconstrained by available clock speeds without compromising the solution's fidelity. Based on experimental results from a hardware benchmark of the autonomous design and benchmarked device models, we project that a nanomagnetic implementation can scale to achieve petaflips per second with millions of neurons. A key contribution of this article is the focus on a hardware metric - flips per second - as a problem and substrate-independent figure-of-merit for an emerging class of hardware annealers known as Ising Machines. Much like the shrinking feature sizes of transistors that have continually driven Moore's Law, we believe that flips per second can be continually improved in later technology generations of a wide class of probabilistic, domain specific hardware.

Solving certain combinatorial optimization problems like Max-Cut becomes challenging once the graph size and edge connectivity increase beyond a threshold, with brute-force algorithms which solve such problems exactly on conventional digital computers having the bottleneck of exponential time complexity. Hence currently, such problems are instead solved approximately using algorithms like Goemans-Williamson (GW) algorithm, run on conventional computers with polynomial time complexity. Phase binarized oscillators (PBOs), also often known as oscillator Ising machines, have been proposed as an alternative to solve such problems. In this paper, restricting ourselves to the combinatorial optimization problem Max-Cut solved on three kinds of graphs (Mobius Ladder, random cubic, Erdös Rényi) up to 100 nodes, we empirically show that computation time/time to solution (TTS) for PBOs (captured through Kuramoto model) grows at a much lower rate (logarithmically:O(log(N)), with respect to graph size N ) compared to GW algorithm, for which TTS increases as square of graph size (O( N 2 )). However, Kuramoto model being a physics-agnostic mathematical model, this time complexity/ TTS trend for PBOs is a general trend and is device-physics agnostic. So for more specific results, we choose spintronic oscillators, known for their high operating frequency (in GHz), and model them through Slavin's model which captures the physics of their coupled magnetization oscillation dynamics. We thereby empirically show that TTS of spintronic oscillators also grows logarithmically with graph size (O(log(N)), while their accuracy is comparable to that of GW. So spintronic oscillators have improved time complexity over GW algorithm. For large graphs, they are expected to compute Max-Cut values much faster than GW algorithm, as well as other oscillators operating at lower frequencies, while maintaining the same level of accuracy., (© 2024 IOP Publishing Ltd. All rights, including for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies, are reserved.)

We present OIM (Oscillator Ising Machines), a new way to make Ising machines using networks of coupled self-sustaining nonlinear oscillators. OIM is theoretically rooted in a novel result that establishes that the phase dynamics of coupled oscillator systems, under the influence of subharmonic injection locking, are governed by a Lyapunov function that is closely related to the Ising Hamiltonian of the coupling graph. As a result, the dynamics of such oscillator networks evolve naturally to local minima of the Lyapunov function. Two simple additional steps (i.e., turning subharmonic locking on and off smoothly, and adding noise) enable the network to find excellent solutions of Ising problems. We demonstrate our method on Ising versions of the MAX-CUT and graph colouring problems, showing that it improves on previously published results on several problems in the G benchmark set. Using synthetic problems with known global minima, we also present initial scaling results. Our scheme, which is amenable to realisation using many kinds of oscillators from different physical domains, is particularly well suited for CMOS IC implementation, offering significant practical advantages over previous techniques for making Ising machines. We report working hardware prototypes using CMOS electronic oscillators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ising machines have recently attracted much attention because they are expected to solve combinatorial optimization problems efficiently. We focus on an Ising machine whose algorithm is based on parallel tempering (PT), and experimentally evaluate the performance of the Ising machine for MIN-CUT problems. Experimental results show that the Ising machine outperforms a famous graph partitioning solver in terms of the quality of solution and the time-to-target-solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamical Ising machines are actively investigated from the perspective of finding efficient heuristics for NP-hard optimization problems. However, the existing data demonstrate super-polynomial scaling of the running time with the system size, which is incompatible with large NP-hard problems. We show that oscillator networks implementing the Kuramoto model of synchronization are capable of demonstrating polynomial scaling. The dynamics of these networks is related to the semidefinite programming relaxation of the Ising model ground state problem. Consequently, such networks, as we numerically demonstrate, are capable of producing the best possible approximation in polynomial time. To reach such performance, however, the reconstruction of the binary Ising state (rounding) must be specially addressed. We demonstrate that commonly implemented forced collapse to a close-to-Ising state may diminish the computational capabilities up to their complete invalidation. Therefore, consistent treatment of rounding may cardinally improve various operation metrics of already existing and upcoming dynamical Ising machines. • Dynamical Ising machines can find the ground state with the best possible performance • To reach the theoretical performance, a proper rounding technique must be supplied • The spectra of the adjacency matrix and Laplacian define the critical anisotropy • For a random graph, there may be no regime ensuring collapse to the ground state [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]