Precision Hamiltonian Encoding in Full-Aperture Spatial Photonic Ising Machines

Abstract

Spatial photonic Ising machines (SPIMs) offer compact, room-temperature hardware with inherently parallel, energy-efficient, single-shot optical evaluation of the Ising Hamiltonian. However, accurate operation has been fundamentally limited by optical aberrations and non-uniform illumination, which corrupt phase-based spin encoding and distort coupling representation, forcing operation to a restricted spatial light modulator (SLM) region. Here we introduce a high-precision full-aperture calibration scheme that overcomes these constraints. By implementing wavefront retrieval and correction with $<\lambda /40$ accuracy, we restore faithful phase encoding across the entire SLM area. Furthermore, we introduce an interaction-normalization method, which compensates for amplitude curvature and enables uniform coupling representation. Together, these advances establish a full-aperture SPIM architecture whose faithful Hamiltonian encoding is a prerequisite for photonic Ising computation.

13 pages, 6 figures