  The purpose of this short contribution is to report on the development of a
Spectral Neighbor Analysis Potential (SNAP) for tungsten. We have focused on
the characterization of elastic and defect properties of the pure material in
order to support molecular dynamics simulations of plasma-facing materials in
fusion reactors. A parallel genetic algorithm approach was used to efficiently
search for fitting parameters optimized against a large number of objective
functions. In addition, we have shown that this many-body tungsten potential
can be used in conjunction with a simple helium pair potential to produce
accurate defect formation energies for the W-He binary system.
