annealer

An annealer is a device or process that performs annealing, a method used to alter the properties of a material or to solve optimization problems. In materials science, annealing involves heating a substance to a controlled temperature and then cooling it slowly to relieve internal stresses, reduce hardness, and improve ductility or workability.

In industrial settings, annealing equipment ranges from batch furnaces to continuous annealing lines. The process typically requires heating to near the material’s recrystallization temperature, maintaining that temperature to allow microstructural changes, and cooling at a controlled rate. The atmosphere inside the furnace, such as inert or reducing environments, may be chosen to prevent unwanted reactions. Variations include full annealing, process annealing, and specialized treatments for glasses, ceramics, or metals.

In computing and optimization, an annealer refers to a device or algorithm that uses the principle of annealing to find optimal or near-optimal solutions. Simulated annealing software mimics a gradual cooling schedule to escape local optima in complex search spaces, while quantum annealers use quantum fluctuations to explore low-energy states in Ising-model representations. Such systems can be implemented as dedicated hardware or run on conventional processors and have applications in scheduling, routing, and various combinatorial optimization problems. They typically do not guarantee a global optimum and their performance depends on problem encoding, cooling schedules, and hardware characteristics.

The term annealer thus covers both physical heat-treatment equipment and computational devices or algorithms that implement annealing-inspired optimization methods.