Optimization of Lennard-Jones atomic clusters

A fast annealing evolutionary algorithm was applied to determine the minimum configurations of Lennard-Jones (LJ) clusters. Other techniques such as limited memory quasi-Newton algorithm (L-BFGS), seeding, similarity checking, and moving, were also used in this method. It has been shown that these techniques dramatically speed up the evolutionary procedure. The lowest known energies were located for the U clusters containing up to 74 atoms. It has been proven that the algorithm is a fast and high efficient optimizing tool, which can be used in energy minimization problems. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.