Refine
Document Type
- ZIB-Report (3)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- reaction coordinate (3) (remove)
Institute
The identification of meaningful reaction coordinates plays a key role in the study of complex molecular systems whose essential dynamics is characterized by rare or slow transition events. In a recent publication, the authors identified a condition under which such reaction coordinates exist - the existence of a so-called transition manifold - and proposed a numerical method for their point-wise computation that relies on short bursts of MD simulations. This article represents an extension of the method towards practical applicability in computational chemistry. It describes an alternative computational scheme that instead relies on more commonly available types of simulation data, such as single long molecular trajectories, or the push-forward of arbitrary canonically-distributed point clouds. It is based on a Galerkin approximation of the transition manifold reaction coordinates, that can be tuned to individual requirements by the choice of the Galerkin ansatz functions. Moreover, we propose a ready-to-implement variant of the new scheme, that computes data-fitted, mesh-free ansatz functions directly from the available simulation data. The efficacy of the new method is demonstrated
on a realistic peptide system.
We consider complex dynamical systems showing metastable behavior but no local
separation of fast and slow time scales. The article raises the question of whether
such systems exhibit a low-dimensional manifold supporting its effective dynamics.
For answering this question, we aim at finding nonlinear coordinates, called reaction
coordinates, such that the projection of the dynamics onto these coordinates preserves
the dominant time scales of the dynamics. We show that, based on a specific
reducibility property, the existence of good low-dimensional reaction coordinates
preserving the dominant time scales is guaranteed. Based on this theoretical framework,
we develop and test a novel numerical approach for computing good reaction
coordinates. The proposed algorithmic approach is fully local and thus not prone to
the curse of dimension with respect to the state space of the dynamics. Hence, it is
a promising method for data-based model reduction of complex dynamical systems
such as molecular dynamics.
In molecular dynamics and related fields one considers dynamical descriptions of complex systems in full (atomic) detail. In order to reduce the overwhelming complexity of realistic systems (high dimension, large timescale spread, limited computational resources) the projection of the full dynamics onto some reaction coordinates is examined in order to extract statistical information like free energies or reaction rates. In this context, the effective dynamics that is induced by the full dynamics on the reaction coordinate space has attracted considerable attention in the literature. In this article, we contribute to this discussion: We first show that if we start with an ergodic diffusion processes whose invariant measure is unique then these properties are inherited by the effective dynamics. Then, we give equations for the effective dynamics, discuss whether the dominant timescales and reaction rates inferred from the effective dynamics are accurate approximations of such quantities for the full dynamics, and compare our findings to results from approaches like Zwanzig-Mori, averaging, or homogenization. Finally, by discussing the algorithmic realization of the effective dynamics, we demonstrate that recent algorithmic techniques like the ”equation-free” approach and the ”heterogeneous multiscale method” can be seen as special cases of our approach.