Biography
George Raftis is a second-year DPhil student in Atomic and Laser Physics in the Lvovsky Group at the University of Oxford, funded by the EPSRC Doctoral Training Partnership. Before joining Oxford, he completed an integrated Master’s degree in Physics and Philosophy at King’s College London, where he developed a strong interest in quantum physics and emerging quantum technologies.
His research centres on the realisation of an all-optical Coherent Ising Machine (CIM), an emerging photonic platform for tackling large-scale combinatorial optimisation problems by mapping them onto the dynamics of coupled optical oscillators. By exploiting optical coherence, ultrafast dynamics, and intrinsic parallelism, these systems offer a promising route toward scalable and energy-efficient alternatives to classical digital processors for tasks such as graph partitioning, MAX-CUT, and other NP-hard problems. George's broader goal is to help shape the next generation of photonic computing technologies and assess whether harnessing quantum behaviour in all-optical CIMs can yield a genuine computational advantage over classical approaches.