Fast reconstruction of programmable interferometers with intensity-only measurements

Programmable linear optical interferometers are promising for classical and quantum applications. Their integrated design makes it possible to create more scalable and stable devices. To use them in practice, one has to reconstruct the whole device model taking the manufacturing errors into account. The inability to address individual interferometer elements complicates the reconstruction problem. A naive approach is to train the model via some complex optimization procedure. A faster optimization-free algorithm has been recently proposed (Bantysh et al 2023 Opt. Express 31 16729–42). However, it requires the full transfer matrix tomography while a more practical setup measures only the fields intensities at the interferometer output. In this paper, we propose the modification of the fast algorithm, which uses additional set of interferometer configurations in order to reconstruct the model in the case of intensity-only measurements. We show that it performs slightly worse than the original fast algorithm but it is more practical and still does not require intensive numerical optimization.