Stochastic tunneling approach for global minimization of complex potential energy landscapes

We investigate a novel stochastic technique for the global optimization of complex potential energy surfaces that avoids the freezing problem of simulated annealing:by allowing the dynamical process to tunnel energetically inaccessible regions of the potential energy surfaces by way of a dynamically adjusted nonlinear transformation of the original potential energy surfaces. We demonstrate the success of this approach, which is characterized by a single adjustable parameter, for three generic hard minimization problems. [S0031-9007(99)08916-4].