In this paper, an optimal multi user detector in DS/CDMA communication systems based on the mean field annealing (MFA) neural network is proposed. It is shown that the NP complete problem of minimizing the objective function of the optimal multi user detector can be translated into minimizing an MFA network energy function. Numerical results show that the proposed detector offers significant performance gain relative to the conventional detector and decorrelating detector while it can be implemented easily in analog hardware.