Minimizing Lennard-Jones potential using a real coded genetic algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization

Abstract

In this paper a recently developed real coded genetic algorithm called MI-LXPM of Deep et al. [8] and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) are applied to the challenging problem of finding the minimum energy configuration of a cluster of identical atoms interacting through the Lennard-Jones potential. Finding the global minimum of this function is very difficult because it has a large number of local minima, which grows exponentially with molecule size. Computational results for a cluster containing up to 15 atoms are obtained and presented. The obtained results show the remarkable performance of MI-LXPM as compared to PSO and to the earlier published results.