Optical Ising spin-glass simulator with tunable short-range couplings

In recent years, optical systems have emerged as a platform for solving hard computational problems, demonstrating their ability to simulate and accelerate the search for the ground state of a given Ising Hamiltonian. Yet, their implementations, exploiting both free-space propagation and scattering media, lack tunability. In this study, we demonstrate enhanced control over the interaction length between spins in an Ising system by tailoring the optical properties of the scattering medium. Finally, we leverage our control to observe correlations between local clusters of spins across replicas.