On the physical application of simulated annealing algorithm

A high-performance general program is presented to deal with the multi-para meter optimization problems in physics. Considering the requirements of phy sical application, some small but significant modifications were made on th e conventional simulated annealing algorithm. A parallel realization was su ggested to further improve the performance of the program. Mathematical and physical examples were taken to test the feasibility and the efficiency of the program. The source code is available from the authors free of charge.