DMD based scalable computation of the spin glass thermodynamics

Spin Glasses (SG) are paradigmatic models for physical, computer science, biological and social systems. The problem of studying the dynamics for SG models is NP-hard, i.e., no algorithm solves it in polynomial time. Here we implement the optical simulation of an SG, exploiting the N segments of a Digital Micromirror Device to play the role of the spin variables, combining the interference at downstream of a scattering material to implement the random couplings and measuring the transmitted light intensity to retrieve the system energy. We demonstrate that This optical platform beats digital computation for large-scale simulation (N>12000).