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An Iterative Minimization Formulation for Saddle-Point Search

This paper proposes and analyzes an iterative minimization formulation for search- ing index-1 saddle points of an energy function. This formulation differs from other eigenvector-following methods by constructing a new objective function near the guess at each iteration step. This leads to a quadratic convergence rate, in comparison to the linear case of the gentlest ascent dynamics (E and Zhou, nonlinearity, vol 24, p1831, 2011) and many other existing methods. We also propose the generalization of the new methodology for saddle points of higher index and for constrained energy functions on manifold.