Figure 9

(a) The upper and lower limits of the Au₁₃ formation energies at each generation during GA optimization with 2-parent (black solid lines) and 4-parent (red dashed lines) crossover schemes. A population of 20 is used for both schemes. Comparison between the energy sampling of (b) randomly-generated and (c) GA-generated Au₁₃ nanoclusters. The data is based on 1000 randomly generated clusters for (b) and the first 1000 structures obtained from a 4-parent GA optimization (i.e. 20 clusters over 50 generations) for (c). Per atom formation energies are given for all graphs.