Integration of ab initio nuclear physics calculations with optimization techniques

Abstract

Optimization techniques are finding their inroads into the field of nuclear physics calculations where the objective functions are very complex and computationally intensive. A vast space of parameters needs searching to obtain a good match between theoretical (computed) and experimental observables, such as energy levels and spectra. In this paper, we propose a design integrating the ab initio nuclear physics code MFDn and the VTDIRECT95 code for derivative-free optimization. We experiment with the initial implementation of the design showing good matches for several single-nucleus cases. For the parallel MFDn code, we determine appropriate processor numbers to execute efficiently a multiple-nuclei parameter search. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.