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Title: Preserving correlations between trajectories for efficient path sampling

Journal Article · · Journal of Chemical Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4922343· OSTI ID:22415982
 [1];  [1]
  1. Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720 (United States)

Importance sampling of trajectories has proved a uniquely successful strategy for exploring rare dynamical behaviors of complex systems in an unbiased way. Carrying out this sampling, however, requires an ability to propose changes to dynamical pathways that are substantial, yet sufficiently modest to obtain reasonable acceptance rates. Satisfying this requirement becomes very challenging in the case of long trajectories, due to the characteristic divergences of chaotic dynamics. Here, we examine schemes for addressing this problem, which engineer correlation between a trial trajectory and its reference path, for instance using artificial forces. Our analysis is facilitated by a modern perspective on Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling, inspired by non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, which clarifies the types of sampling strategies that can scale to long trajectories. Viewed in this light, the most promising such strategy guides a trial trajectory by manipulating the sequence of random numbers that advance its stochastic time evolution, as done in a handful of existing methods. In cases where this “noise guidance” synchronizes trajectories effectively, as the Glauber dynamics of a two-dimensional Ising model, we show that efficient path sampling can be achieved for even very long trajectories.

OSTI ID:
22415982
Journal Information:
Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 142, Issue 23; Other Information: (c) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-9606
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English