Application of genetic algorithms to hydrogenated silicon clusters

We discuss the application of biologically inspired genetic algorithms to determine the ground state structures of a number of Si-H clusters. The total energy of a given configuration of a cluster has been obtained by using a non-orthogonal tight-binding model and the energy minimization has been carried out by using genetic algorithms and their recent variant differential evolution. Our results for ground state structures and cohesive energies for Si-H clusters are in good agreement with the earlier work conducted using the simulated annealing technique. We find that the results obtained by genetic algorithms turn out to be comparable and often better than the results obtained by the simulated annealing technique.