Simulated Annealing is a family of randomized algorithms used to solve many combinatorial optimization problems. In practice they have been applied to solve some presumably hard (e.g., NP-complete) problems. The level of performance obtained has been promised [5, 2, 6, 14]. The success of its heuristic technique has motivated analysis of this algorithm from a theoretical point of view. In parti...

The effect of short-time and long-time annealing at 250 • C on the conductivity, hole density, and Curie temperature of GaMnAs single layers and GaMnAs/InGaMnAs heterostructures is studied by in-situ conductivity measurements as well as Raman and SQUID measurements before and after annealing. Whereas the conductivity monotonously increases with increasing annealing time, the hole density and th...

The mechanical properties and microstructural developments of 321 stainless steel during thermomechanical process were investigated. The repetitive cold rolling and subsequent annealing were conducted to achieve nanocrystalline structure in an AISI 321 stainless steel. Heavily cold rolling at −20°C was conducted to form martensite in metastable austenitic steel. The process was followed by anne...

Abstract: In the present study the effect of thermomechanical treatment (cold work and annealing) on the transformation behavior of NiTi shape memory alloys was studied. Differential scanning calorimetry was used to determine transformation temperature and its relation to precipitates and defects. Three alloys including Ti-50.3at.% Ni, Ti-50.5at.% Ni (reclamated orthodontic wires) and 50.6at...

A Simulated Annealing method is presented for the solution of nonlinear time series estimation problems, by maximization of the a Posteriori Likelihood function. Homogeneous temperature annealing is proposed for smoothing problems and inhomogeneous temperature annealing for filtering problems. Both methods of annealing guarantee convergence to the Maximum A Posteriori Likelihood (MAP) estimate....

The In2S3 thin film is prepared using sulfurate method under a vacuum in a sealed tube of amorphous indium thin film. The later film is pre-deposited on glass with thermal evaporation. We have studied the effect of the temperature and the annealing time on the structural and morphological properties In2S3 thin films. The X-ray diffraction (XRD) shows a good crystallinity found until the anneali...

The choice of a good annealing schedule is necessary for good performance of simulated annealing for combinatorial optimization problems. In this paper, we pose the simulated annealing task decision-theoretically for the first time, allowing the user to explicitly define utilities of time and solution quality. We then demonstrate the application of reinforcement learning techniques towards appr...

Quantum annealing is a general strategy for solving difficult optimization problems with the aid of quantum adiabatic evolution. Both analytical and numerical evidence suggests that under idealized, closed system conditions, quantum annealing can outperform classical thermalization-based algorithms such as simulated annealing. Current engineered quantum annealing devices have a decoherence time...