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Title: Metrics for measuring distances in configuration spaces

Journal Article · · Journal of Chemical Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4828704· OSTI ID:22251444
; ; ; ;  [1];  [2]
  1. Department of Physics, Universität Basel, Klingelbergstr. 82, 4056 Basel (Switzerland)
  2. Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, College of Pharmacy, Purdue University, 575 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907 (United States)

In order to characterize molecular structures we introduce configurational fingerprint vectors which are counterparts of quantities used experimentally to identify structures. The Euclidean distance between the configurational fingerprint vectors satisfies the properties of a metric and can therefore safely be used to measure dissimilarities between configurations in the high dimensional configuration space. In particular we show that these metrics are a perfect and computationally cheap replacement for the root-mean-square distance (RMSD) when one has to decide whether two noise contaminated configurations are identical or not. We introduce a Monte Carlo approach to obtain the global minimum of the RMSD between configurations, which is obtained from a global minimization over all translations, rotations, and permutations of atomic indices.

OSTI ID:
22251444
Journal Information:
Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 139, Issue 18; Other Information: (c) 2013 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0021-9606
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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