In the past two decades, the simulated annealing technique has been considered as a powerful approach to handle many NP-hard optimization problems in VLSI designs. Recently, a new Monte Carlo and optimization technique, named simulated tempering, was invented and has been successfully applied to many scientific problems, from random field Ising modeling to the traveling salesman problem. It is ...

Tail estimates are developed for power law probability distributions with exponential tempering, using a conditional maximum likelihood approach based on the upper order statistics. Tempered power law distributions are intermediate between heavy power-law tails and Laplace or exponential tails, and are sometimes called “semiheavy” tailed distributions. The estimation method is demonstrated on s...

D. A. Skobir Balantič, B. Žužek, F. Vodopivec, Institute of Metals and Technology, Ljubljana, Slovenia Specimens of high chromium creep resistant steel were tempered at 800 °C for different times and examined in SEM. After short tempering stringers of cementite particles are formed at ferrite grain boundaries. By longer tempering, the content of chromium and molybdenum increase up to Cr18Fe3Mo2...

In these lectures I describe some theoretical tools and numerical techniques to investigate glassy systems. The discussion is centered on spin glasses where there has been a large amount of theoretical as well as numerical work during the recent years. After discussing the utility of introducing real replicas in numerical simulations, I analyze topics such as equilibration methods and the analy...

Parallel tempering molecular dynamics simulations have been performed for 1,4-polybutadiene polymer melts in the 323 K–473 K temperature domain at atmospheric pressure. The parallel tempering approach provides a vast improvement in the equilibration and sampling of conformational phase space for the atomistic melt chains in comparison with conventional molecular dynamics simulations even for mo...

Quantum annealing Quantum annealing (also known as alloy, crystallization or tempering) is analogous to simulated annealing but in substitution of thermal activation by quantum tunneling. The class of algorithmic methods for quantum annealing (dubbed: 'QA'), sometimes referred by the italian school as Quantum Stochastic Optimization ('QSO'), is a promising metaheuristic tool for solving local s...

We present an optimization approach to the weak approximation of a general class of stochastic differential equations with jumps, in particular, when value functions with compact support are considered. Our approach employs a mathematical programming technique yielding upper and lower bounds of the expectation, without Monte Carlo sample paths simulations, based upon the exponential tempering o...

Given a good importance function, importance sampling is able to achieve satisfactory precisions within a reasonable time. In addition to the well known requirement that the importance function should have a similar shape to the target density (Rubinstein, 1981), it is also highly recommended that the importance function possess heavy tails (Geweke, 1989; MacKay, 1998; Yuan and Druzdzel, 2004)....

The heat capacity and isomer distributions of the 38-atom Lennard-Jones cluster have been calculated in the canonical ensemble using parallel tempering Monte Carlo methods. A distinct region of temperature is identified that corresponds to equilibrium between the global minimum structure and the icosahedral basin of structures. This region of temperatures occurs below the melting peak of the he...

The free-energy landscape of the alpha-helix of protein G is studied by means of metadynamics coupled with a solute tempering algorithm. Metadynamics allows to overcome large energy barriers, whereas solute tempering improves the sampling with an affordable computational effort. From the sampled free-energy surface we are able to reproduce a number of experimental observations, such as the fact...