Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

© The Author(s) 2022

Lars Q. English is a professor of Physics at Dickinson College.

Combinatorial optimization problems are difficult to solve with conventional algorithms. Here we explore networks of nonlinear electronic oscillators evolving dynamically towards the solution to such problems. We show that when driven into subharmonic response, such oscillator networks can minimize the Ising Hamiltonian on non-trivial antiferromagnetically-coupled 3-regular graphs. In this context, the spin-up and spin-down states of the Ising machine are represented by the oscillators’ response at the even or odd driving cycles. Our experimental setting of driven nonlinear oscillators coupled via a programmable switch matrix leads to a unique energy minimizer when one exists, and probes frustration where appropriate. Theoretical modeling of the electronic oscillators and their couplings allows us to accurately reproduce the qualitative features of the experimental results and extends the results to larger graphs. This suggests the promise of this setup as a prototypical one for exploring the capabilities of such an unconventional computing platform.

This published version is made available on Dickinson Scholar with the permission of the publisher. For more information on the published version, visit Springer's Website. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-022-01111-x

English, L. Q., A. V. Zampetaki, K. P. Kalinin, N. G. Berloff, and P. G. Kevrekidis. An Ising Machine Based on Networks of Subharmonic Electrical Resonators. Communication Physics 5 (2022): Article 333. https://www.nature.com/articles/s42005-022-01111-x