Title
SGO: A fast engine for ab initio atomic structure global optimization by differential evolution.
Abstract
As the high throughout calculations and material genome approaches become more and more popular in material science, the search for optimal ways to predict atomic global minimum structure is a high research priority. This paper presents a fast method for global search of atomic structures at ab initio level. The structures global optimization (SGO) engine consists of a high-efficiency differential evolution algorithm, accelerated local relaxation methods and a plane-wave density functional theory code running on GPU machines. The purpose is to show what can be achieved by combining the superior algorithms at the different levels of the searching scheme. SGO can search the global-minimum configurations of crystals, two-dimensional materials and quantum clusters without prior symmetry restriction in a relatively short time (half or several hours for systems with less than 25 atoms), thus making such a task a routine calculation. Comparisons with other existing methods such as minima hopping and genetic algorithm are provided. One motivation of our study is to investigate the properties of magnetic systems in different phases. The SGO engine is capable of surveying the local minima surrounding the global minimum, which provides the information for the overall energy landscape of a given system. Using this capability we have found several new configurations for testing systems, explored their energy landscape, and demonstrated that the magnetic moment of metal clusters fluctuates strongly in different local minima.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1016/j.cpc.2017.05.005
Computer Physics Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Atomic structure search,Differential evolution,Density functional theory,Energy landscape
Cluster (physics),Mathematical optimization,Global optimization,Relaxation (iterative method),Differential evolution,Maxima and minima,Ab initio,Energy landscape,Genetic algorithm,Physics
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
219
0010-4655
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
11
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhanghui Chen1193.33
Weile Jia200.68
Xiangwei Jiang3112.64
Shushen Li4101.60
Lin-Wang Wang514116.72