Discovered function for positron collisions with alkali-metal atoms using genetic programming

Genetic programming (GP) has been used to discover the function that describes the collisions of positrons with sodium, potassium, rubidium and cesium atoms at low and intermediate energies. The GP has been running based on experimental data of the total collisional cross sections to produce the total cross sections for each target atom. The incident energy and the static dipole polarizability of the alkali target atom have been used as input variables to find the discovered function. The experimental, calculated and predicted total collisional cross sections are compared. The discovered function shows a good match to the experimental data. We find that the GP technique is able to improve upon more traditional methods. To our knowledge, this is the first application of the GP technique to the data of positron collisions with alkali atoms at low and intermediate energies.