Estimate of the Cutoff Errors in the Ewald Summation for Dipolar Systems

Theoretical estimates for the cutoff errors in the Ewald summation method for dipolar systems are derived. Absolute errors in the total energy, forces and torques, both for the real and reciprocal space parts, are considered. The applicability of the estimates is tested and confirmed in several numerical examples. We demonstrate that these estimates can be used easily in determining the optimal parameters of the dipolar Ewald summation in the sense that they minimize the computation time for a predefined, user set, accuracy.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, Revtex style, submitted to J. Chem. Phy

"The numerical accuracy of truncated Ewald sums for periodic systems with long-range Coulomb interactions"

Ewald summation is widely used to calculate electrostatic interactions in computer simulations of condensed-matter systems. We present an analysis of the errors arising from truncating the infinite real- and Fourier-space lattice sums in the Ewald formulation. We derive an optimal choice for the Fourier-space cutoff given a screening parameter $\eta$. We find that the number of vectors in Fourier space required to achieve a given accuracy scales with $\eta^3$. The proposed method can be used to determine computationally efficient parameters for Ewald sums, to assess the quality of Ewald-sum implementations, and to compare different implementations.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures (Encapsulated PostScript), LaTe

Electrostatics in Periodic Slab Geometries I

We propose a new method to sum up electrostatic interactions in 2D slab geometries. It consists of a combination of two recently proposed methods, the 3D Ewald variant of Yeh and Berkowitz, J. Chem. Phys. 111 (1999) 3155, and the purely 2D method MMM2D by Arnold and Holm, to appear in Chem. Phys. Lett. 2002. The basic idea involves two steps. First we use a three dimensional summation method whose summation order is changed to sum up the interactions in a slab-wise fashion. Second we subtract the unwanted interactions with the replicated layers analytically. The resulting method has full control over the introduced errors. The time to evaluate the layer correction term scales linearly with the number of charges, so that the full method scales like an ordinary 3D Ewald method, with an almost linear scaling in a mesh based implementation. In this paper we will introduce the basic ideas, derive the layer correction term and numerically verify our analytical results.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Electrostatics in Periodic Slab Geometries II

In a previous paper a method was developed to subtract the interactions due to periodically replicated charges (or other long-range entities) in one spatial dimension. The method constitutes a generalized "electrostatic layer correction" (ELC) which adapts any standard 3D summation method to slab-like conditions. Here the implementation of the layer correction is considered in detail for the standard Ewald (EW3DLC) and the PPPM mesh Ewald (PPPMLC) methods. In particular this method offers a strong control on the accuracy and an improved computational complexity of O(N log N) for mesh-based implementations. We derive anisotropic Ewald error formulas and give some fundamental guidelines for optimization. A demonstration of the accuracy, error formulas and computation times for typical systems is also presented.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Fast Ewald summation for electrostatic potentials with arbitrary periodicity

A unified treatment for fast and spectrally accurate evaluation of electrostatic potentials subject to periodic boundary conditions in any or none of the three space dimensions is presented. Ewald decomposition is used to split the problem into a real space and a Fourier space part, and the FFT based Spectral Ewald (SE) method is used to accelerate the computation of the latter. A key component in the unified treatment is an FFT based solution technique for the free-space Poisson problem in three, two or one dimensions, depending on the number of non-periodic directions. The cost of calculations is furthermore reduced by employing an adaptive FFT for the doubly and singly periodic cases, allowing for different local upsampling rates. The SE method will always be most efficient for the triply periodic case as the cost for computing FFTs will be the smallest, whereas the computational cost for the rest of the algorithm is essentially independent of the periodicity. We show that the cost of removing periodic boundary conditions from one or two directions out of three will only marginally increase the total run time. Our comparisons also show that the computational cost of the SE method for the free-space case is typically about four times more expensive as compared to the triply periodic case. The Gaussian window function previously used in the SE method, is here compared to an approximation of the Kaiser-Bessel window function, recently introduced. With a carefully tuned shape parameter that is selected based on an error estimate for this new window function, runtimes for the SE method can be further reduced. Keywords: Fast Ewald summation, Fast Fourier transform, Arbitrary periodicity, Coulomb potentials, Adaptive FFT, Fourier integral, Spectral accuracy.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure

Optimisation of a Brownian dynamics algorithm for semidilute polymer solutions

Simulating the static and dynamic properties of semidilute polymer solutions with Brownian dynamics (BD) requires the computation of a large system of polymer chains coupled to one another through excluded-volume and hydrodynamic interactions. In the presence of periodic boundary conditions, long-ranged hydrodynamic interactions are frequently summed with the Ewald summation technique. By performing detailed simulations that shed light on the influence of several tuning parameters involved both in the Ewald summation method, and in the efficient treatment of Brownian forces, we develop a BD algorithm in which the computational cost scales as O(N^{1.8}), where N is the number of monomers in the simulation box. We show that Beenakker's original implementation of the Ewald sum, which is only valid for systems without bead overlap, can be modified so that \theta-solutions can be simulated by switching off excluded-volume interactions. A comparison of the predictions of the radius of gyration, the end-to-end vector, and the self-diffusion coefficient by BD, at a range of concentrations, with the hybrid Lattice Boltzmann/Molecular Dynamics (LB/MD) method shows excellent agreement between the two methods. In contrast to the situation for dilute solutions, the LB/MD method is shown to be significantly more computationally efficient than the current implementation of BD for simulating semidilute solutions. We argue however that further optimisations should be possible.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, revised version to appear in Physical Review E (2012