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Abstract:

The coherent Ising machine (CIM) enables efficient sampling of low-lying energy states of the Ising Hamiltonian with all-to-all connectivity by encoding the spins in the amplitudes of pulsed modes in an optical parametric oscillator (OPO). The interaction between the pulses is realized by means of measurement-based optoelectronic feedforward, which enhances the gain for lower-energy spin configurations. We present an efficient method of simulating the CIM on a classical computer that outperforms the CIM itself, as well as the noisy mean-field annealer in terms of both the quality of the samples and the computational speed. It is furthermore advantageous with respect to the CIM in that it can handle Ising Hamiltonians with arbitrary real-valued node coupling strengths. These results illuminate the nature of the faster performance exhibited by the CIM and may give rise to a new class of quantum-inspired algorithms of classical annealing that can successfully compete with existing methods.

Abstract:

We perform balanced homodyne detection of the electromagnetic field in a single-mode tapered optical nanofiber surrounded by rubidium atoms in a magneto-optical trap. Resonant fluorescence of atoms into the nanofiber mode manifests itself as increased quantum noise of the field quadratures. The autocorrelation function of the homodyne detector's output photocurrent exhibits exponential fall-off with a decay time constant of 26.3±0.6  ns, which is consistent with the theoretical expectation under our experimental conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experiment in which fluorescence into a tapered optical nanofiber has been observed and measured by balanced optical homodyne detection.