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Swarthmore College

Series

2020

Liquid crystals; nematic director; genetic algorithm; free energy minimization

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Full-Text Articles in Physics

The Genetic Algorithm: Using Biology To Compute Liquid Crystal Director Configurations, Shouzhuo Yang , '23, Peter J. Collings Nov 2020

The Genetic Algorithm: Using Biology To Compute Liquid Crystal Director Configurations, Shouzhuo Yang , '23, Peter J. Collings

Physics & Astronomy Faculty Works

The genetic algorithm is an optimization routine for finding the solution to a problem that requires a function to be minimized. It accomplishes this by creating a population of solutions and then producing “offspring” solutions from this population by combining two “parental” solutions in much the way that the DNA of biological parents is combined in the DNA of offspring. Strengths of the algorithm include that it is simple to implement, no trial solution is required, and the results are fairly accurate. Weaknesses include its slow computational speed and its tendency to find a local minimum that does not represent …