Combinatorial optimization problems are crucial for widespread applications
but remain difficult to solve on a large scale with conventional hardware.
Novel optical platforms, known as coherent or photonic Ising machines, are
attracting considerable attention as accelerators on optimization tasks
formulable as Ising models. Annealing is a well-known technique based on
adiabatic evolution for finding optimal solutions in classical and quantum
systems made by atoms, electrons, or photons. Although various Ising machines
employ annealing in some form, adiabatic computing on optical settings has been
only partially investigated. Here, we realize the adiabatic evolution of
frustrated Ising models with 100 spins programmed by spatial light modulation.
We use holographic and optical control to change the spin couplings
adiabatically, and exploit experimental noise to explore the energy landscape.
Annealing enhances the convergence to the Ising ground state and allows to find
the problem solution with probability close to unity. Our results demonstrate a
photonic scheme for combinatorial optimization in analogy with adiabatic
quantum algorithms and enforced by optical vector-matrix multiplications and
scalable photonic technology.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure
