Sampling complex potential energies is one of the most pressing challenges of contemporary computational science. Inspired by recent efforts that use quantum effects and discretized Feynmans path integrals to overcome large barriers we propose a replica exchange method. In each replica two copies of the same system with halved potential strengths interact via inelastic springs. The strength of the spring is varied in the different replicas so as to bridge the gap between the infinitely strong spring, that corresponds to the Boltzmann replica and the less tight ones. We enhance the spring length fluctuations using Metadynamics. We test the method on simple yet challenging problems.
In this paper we propose a new formalism to map history-dependent metadynamics in a Markovian process. We apply this formalism to a model Langevin dynamics and determine the equilibrium distribution of a collection of simulations. We demonstrate that the reconstructed free energy is an unbiased estimate of the underlying free energy and analytically derive an expression for the error. The present results can be applied to other history-dependent stochastic processes such as Wang-Landau sampling.
We present a method for determining the free energy dependence on a selected number of collective variables using an adaptive bias. The formalism provides a unified description which has metadynamics and canonical sampling as limiting cases. Convergence and errors can be rigorously and easily controlled. The parameters of the simulation can be tuned so as to focus the computational effort only on the physically relevant regions of the order parameter space. The algorithm is tested on the reconstruction of alanine dipeptide free energy landscape.
We use exact diagonalization to study the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis (ETH) in the quantum dimer model on the square and triangular lattices. Due to the nonergodicity of the local plaquette-flip dynamics, the Hilbert space, which consists of highly constrained close-packed dimer configurations, splits into sectors characterized by topological invariants. We show that this has important consequences for ETH: We find that ETH is clearly satisfied only when each topological sector is treated separately, and only for moderate ratios of the potential and kinetic terms in the Hamiltonian. By contrast, when the spectrum is treated as a whole, ETH breaks down on the square lattice, and apparently also on the triangular lattice. These results demonstrate that quantum dimer models have interesting thermalization dynamics.
We present a novel method for the calculation of the energy density of states D(E) for systems described by classical statistical mechanics. The method builds on an extension of a recently proposed strategy that allows the free energy profile of a canonical system to be recovered within a pre-assigned accuracy,[A. Laio and M. Parrinello, PNAS 2002]. The method allows a good control over the error on the recovered system entropy. This fact is exploited to obtain D(E) more efficiently by combining measurements at different temperatures. The accuracy and efficiency of the method are tested for the two-dimensional Ising model (up to size 50x50) by comparison with both exact results and previous studies. This method is a general one and should be applicable to more realistic model systems.
A model of dipolar dimer liquid (DDL) on a two-dimensional lattice has been proposed. We found that at high density and low temperature, it has a partially ordered phase which we called glacia phase. The glacia phase transition can be understood by mapping the DDL to an annealed Ising model on random graphs. In the high density limit the critical temperature obtained by the Monte Carlo simulation is $k_BT_c^G = (3.5pm0.1)J$, which agrees with the estimations of the upper and lower bounds of $k_BT_c^G$ with exactly solved Ising models. In the high density and low temperature limit, we further studied configurational entropy of the DDL in the presence of the neutral polymers. The suppression of the configurational entropy scales as a power law of the polymer length $lambda_p^alpha$ with $alpha geq 1$, which implies that the configurational entropy of water plays essential roles in understanding the hydrophobic effect and the protein folding problem.