Publications

J. J. More, "Computing Mountain Passes and Transition States," Preprint ANL/MCS-P957-0502, May 2002. [pdf]

We propose the elastic string algorithm for computing mountain passes in finite-dimensional problems. We analyze the convergence properties and numerical performance of this algorithm for benchmark problems in chemistry and discretizations of infinite-dimensional variational problems. We show that any limit point of the elastic string algorithm is a path that crosses a critical point at which the Hessian matrix is not positive definite.