Frustration Elimination and Excited State Search in Coherent Ising Machines

Frustration, that is, the impossibility of satisfying the energetic preferences between all spin pairs simultaneously, underlies the complexity of many fundamental properties in spin systems, including the computational difficulty in determining their ground states. Coherent Ising machines (CIMs) have been proposed as a promising analog computational approach to efficiently find different degenerate ground states of large and complex Ising models. However, CIMs also face challenges in solving frustrated Ising models: frustration not only reduces the probability of finding good solutions, but it also prohibits the leveraging of quantum effects in doing so. To circumvent these detrimental effects of frustration, we show how frustrated Ising models can be mapped to frustration-free CIM configurations by including ancillary modes and modifying the coupling protocol used in current CIM designs. Such frustration elimination may empower current CIMs to benefit from quantum effects in dealing with frustrated Ising models. In addition, these ancillary modes can also enable error detection and searching for excited states.