Finding all the stationary points of a potential-energy landscape via numerical polynomial-homotopy-continuation method.

The stationary points (SPs) of a potential-energy landscape play a crucial role in understanding many of the physical or chemical properties of a given system. However, unless they are found analytically, no efficient method is available to obtain all the SPs of a given potential. We present a method, called the numerical polynomial-homotopy-continuation method, which numerically finds all the SPs, and is embarrassingly parallelizable. The method requires the nonlinearity of the potential to be polynomial-like, which is the case for almost all of the potentials arising in physical and chemical systems. We also certify the numerically obtained SPs so that they are independent of the numerical tolerance used during the computation. It is then straightforward to separate out the local and global minima. As a first application, we take the XY model with power-law interaction, which is shown to have a polynomial-like nonlinearity, and we apply the method.