@misc{HartmannRichterSchuetteetal., author = {Hartmann, Carsten and Richter, Lorenz and Sch{\"u}tte, Christof and Zhang, Wei}, title = {Variational characterization of free energy: Theory and algorithms}, issn = {1438-0064}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-65045}, abstract = {The article surveys and extends variational formulations of the thermodynamic free energy and discusses their information-theoretic content from the perspective of mathematical statistics. We revisit the well-known Jarzynski equality for nonequilibrium free energy sampling within the framework of importance sampling and Girsanov change-of-measure transformations. The implications of the different variational formulations for designing efficient stochastic optimization and nonequilibrium simulation algorithms for computing free energies are discussed and illustrated.}, language = {en} } @misc{WangHartmannSchuette, author = {Wang, Han and Hartmann, Carsten and Sch{\"u}tte, Christof}, title = {Linear response theory and optimal control for a molecular system under nonequilibrium conditions}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-18944}, abstract = {In this paper, we propose a straightforward generalization of linear response theory to systems in nonequilibrium that are subject to nonequilibrium driving. We briefly revisit the standard linear response result for equilibrium systems, where we consider Langevin dynamics as a special case, and then give an alternative derivation using a change-of-measure argument that does not rely on any stationarity or reversibility assumption. This procedure moreover easily enables us to calculate the second order correction to the linear response formula (which may or may not be useful in practice). Furthermore, we outline how the novel nonequilibirum linear response formula can be used to compute optimal controls of molecular systems for cases in which one wants to steer the system to maximize a certain target expectation value. We illustrate our approach with simple numerical examples.}, language = {en} }