GYutsis: heuristic based calculation of general recoupling coefficients Original Research Article

General angular momentum recoupling coefficients can be expressed as a summation formula over products of 6-j coefficients. Yutsis, Levinson and Vanagas developed graphical techniques for representing the general recoupling coefficient as a cubic graph and they describe a set of reduction rules allowing a stepwise generation of the corresponding summation formula. This paper is a follow up to [Van Dyck and Fack, Comput. Phys. Comm. 151 (2003) 353–368] where we described a heuristic algorithm based on these techniques. In this article we separate the heuristic from the algorithm and describe some new heuristic approaches which can be plugged into the generic algorithm. We show that these new heuristics lead to good results: in many cases we get a more efficient summation formula than our previous approach, in particular for problems of higher order. In addition the new features and the use of our program GYutsis, which implements these techniques, is described both for end users and application programmers.