Observing a Phase Transition in a Coherent Ising Machine

A coherent Ising machine (CIM) is known to deliver the low-energy states of the Ising model. Here, we investigate how well the CIM simulates the thermodynamic properties of a two-dimensional square-lattice Ising model. Assuming that the spin sets sampled by the CIM can be regarded as a canonical ensemble, we estimate the effective temperature of the spins represented by degenerate optical parametric oscillator pulses by using maximum likelihood estimation. With the obtained temperature, we confirmed that the thermodynamic quantities obtained with the CIM exhibited a phase-transition-like behavior that better matches the analytical and numerical results than the mean field one.