Distributions of steady states in a network of degenerate optical parametric oscillators in solving combinatorial optimization problems

Abstract

We investigate network of degenerate optical parametric oscillators (DOPOs) as a model of the coherent Ising machine, an architecture for solving Ising problems. The network represents the interaction in the Ising model, which is a generalization of a previously proposed one for the two-DOPO case. Dynamics of the DOPOs is described by the Fokker-Planck equation in the positive $P$ representation. We obtain approximate steady state distributions for arbitrary Ising problems under some ansatz. Using the method of statistical mechanics, we analytically demonstrate that the most probable states in a particular range of the parameters correspond to the true optimal states for two rather simple problems, i.e., fully-connected ferromagnetic coupling without/with binary random fields. In particular, for the random-field problem, the distribution correctly detects the phase transition that occurs in the target Ising model with varying the magnitude of the fields.