Direction and Coverage Laws for Retained Feedback Control of Wave Hardware
A formal treatment of retained feedback as a control architecture for programmable wave hardware, with interface guarantees, cross-scale hardware evidence, controlled simulation, and explicit boundaries on where the approach does and does not apply.
A bounded framework for parallel-readout photonic, radio-frequency, sensing, and quantum systems.
Three commercial quantum processors, controlled simulation through one million channels, and disclosed negative results.
Programmable wave hardware is usually treated as an evaluation oracle inside an external optimizer. The paper studies the inverse arrangement: the writable configuration carries the computational state and one parallel acquisition advances the full configuration each cycle.
The analysis separates per-channel feedback from ranking-only feedback, extends the framework to partial readout, and states the synchronization requirement that keeps measurements paired with the configurations that produced them. The emphasis is on interface guarantees and measurable behavior, not a disclosed internal implementation.
The evidence spans a pre-registered retained-versus-reset experiment on IQM, 107-channel regulation on Rigetti under a fixed acquisition budget, 156-qubit tracking on IBM Heron, and controlled coupled-plant simulation through one million channels. Negative results and non-claims are included alongside the wins.
Leibel, Matthew S. (2026). Stateful Wave Computing: Direction and Coverage Laws for Retained Feedback Control of Wave Hardware. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21466429