Escaping free-energy minima

We introduce a novel and powerful method for exploring the properties of the multidimensional free energy surfaces of complex many-body systems by means of a coarse-grained non-Markovian dynamics in the space defined by a few collective coordinates.A characteristic feature of this dynamics is the presence of a history-dependent potential term that, in time, fills the minima in the free energy surface, allowing the efficient exploration and accurate determination of the free energy surface as a function of the collective coordinates. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in the case of the dissociation of a NaCl molecule in water and in the study of the conformational changes of a dialanine in solution.Comment: 3 figure

Free Energy of ABJM Theory

The free energy of ABJM theory has previously been computed in the strong and weak coupling limits. In this note, we report on results for the computation of the first non-vanishing quantum correction to the free energy, from the field theory side. The correction can be expressed in terms of a thermal mass for the scalar fields. This mass vanishes to 1-loop order, but there is a non-vanishing result to 2-loop order. Hence, the leading correction to the free energy is non-analytic in the 't Hooft coupling constant lambda. The reason is that the infrared divergences necessitate a resummation of ring diagrams and a related reorganization of perturbation theory, in which already the leading correction receives contributions from all orders in lambda. These results suggest that the free energy interpolates smoothly between weak and strong coupling.Comment: 6 pages. Contribution to the proceedings of the 16th European Workshop on String Theory 2010, Real Jardin Botanico, Madrid, 14-18 June 2010. v2: published versio

Psychophysical identity and free energy

An approach to implementing variational Bayesian inference in biological systems is considered, under which the thermodynamic free energy of a system directly encodes its variational free energy. In the case of the brain, this assumption places constraints on the neuronal encoding of generative and recognition densities, in particular requiring a stochastic population code. The resulting relationship between thermodynamic and variational free energies is prefigured in mind-brain identity theses in philosophy and in the Gestalt hypothesis of psychophysical isomorphism.Comment: 22 pages; published as a research article on 8/5/2020 in Journal of the Royal Society Interfac

Gibbs free energy and Helmholtz free energy for a three-dimensional Ising-like model

The critical behavior of a 3D Ising-like system is studied at the microscopic level of consideration. The free energy of ordering is calculated analytically as an explicit function of temperature, an external field and the initial parameters of the model. Within a unified approach, both Gibbs and Helmholtz free energies are obtained and the dependencies of them on the external field and the order parameter, respectively, are presented graphically. The regions of stability, metastability, and unstability are established on the order parameter-temperature plane. The way of implementation of the well-known Maxwell construction is proposed at microscopic level.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Exploring High Dimensional Free Energy Landscapes: Temperature Accelerated Sliced Sampling

Biased sampling of collective variables is widely used to accelerate rare events in molecular simulations and to explore free energy surfaces. However, computational efficiency of these methods decreases with increasing number of collective variables, which severely limits the predictive power of the enhanced sampling approaches. Here we propose a method called Temperature Accelerated Sliced Sampling (TASS) that combines temperature accelerated molecular dynamics with umbrella sampling and metadynamics to sample the collective variable space in an efficient manner. The presented method can sample a large number of collective variables and is advantageous for controlled exploration of broad and unbound free energy basins. TASS is also shown to achieve quick free energy convergence and is practically usable with ab initio molecular dynamics techniques