Annealing

Annealing may refer to:

• Annealing (metallurgy), a heat treatment that alters the microstructure of a material causing changes in properties such as strength, hardness, and ductility
• Annealing (glass), heating a piece of glass to remove stress
• Nucleic acid thermodynamics, includes the annealing of DNA or RNA pairing by hydrogen bonds to a complementary sequence, forming a double-stranded polynucleotide
• Simulated annealing, a technique for searching for a solution in a space otherwise too large for ordinary search methods to yield results
• Quantum annealing, a method for finding solutions to combinatorial optimisation problems and ground states of glassy systems using quantum fluctuations