Hannover 2016 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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A: Fachverband Atomphysik

A 21: Interaction with strong or short laser pulses

A 21.12: Poster

Dienstag, 1. März 2016, 16:30–19:00, Empore Lichthof

Finding the global minimum using Gaussian processes — •Mehrdad Baghery, Ulf Saalmann, and Jan-Michael Rost — Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany

Minimising functions is crucial to many problems in ranging from astrophysics to quantum optimal design. Among these lies the problem of finding the minimum of expensive-to-evaluate functions, rendering the fact that the minimum has to be found by making as few observations as possible.

In order to tackle this problem, we introduce an auxiliary function (expressed as a Gaussian process) which mimics the original function as more and more observations are made. This function is relatively cheap-to-evaluate, and more importantly, its derivatives are analytically expressible. By finding the minimum of this auxiliary function using textbook gradient-based minimisation algorithms, it is possible to find the minimum of the original function.

As a physical application, we will use the algorithm to find a laser pulse shape which, when shone on a hydrogen atom, maximises the charge yield.