On Wednesday, May 8, 2024, Centro Fermi hosted the kick-off Meeting of the PRIN-founded research project: PHERMIAC- Photonic High-Energy cosmic-ray Monitoring via Ising machines and Advanced Combinatorial Optimization (Code: 2022597MBS) The project aims to create an innovative device for applying ultrafast and energy-efficient photonic computation to high-energy physics, implementing a photonic Ising machine for ultrafast parallel processing of millions of spins. This device will be optimized for monitoring and reconstructing detected tracks of cosmic muons and other elementary particles.

After a warm welcome by the newly appointed President Angela Bracco, CREF PI Fabrizio Coccetti introduced the framework of the project and the agenda.

Silvia Gentilini (CNR@Sapienza) introduced the Spatial Photonic Ising Machine (SPIM), Romolo Savo (CREF) presented his research and experiments at CREF Photonic Laboratory, Marcello Calvanese Strinati (CREF) talked about Simulating continuous spin models via the hyperspin machine, Valentina Palmieri (CNR) presented her research on Applications in Biophysics and Medicine in partnership with Gemelli Hospital and University, Neda Ghofraniha (CNR@Sapienza) traced an overview of Applications in fundamental physics: the experimental observation of the Parisi overlap.