Quantum fluctuations can promote or inhibit glass formation

The very nature of glass is somewhat mysterious: while relaxation times in glasses are of sufficient magnitude that large-scale motion on the atomic level is essentially as slow as it is in the crystalline state, the structure of glass appears barely different than that of the liquid that produced it. Quantum mechanical systems ranging from electron liquids to superfluid helium appear to form glasses, but as yet no unifying framework exists connecting classical and quantum regimes of vitrification. Here we develop new insights from theory and simulation into the quantum glass transition that surprisingly reveal distinct regions where quantum fluctuations can either promote or inhibit glass formation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nature Physics. 22 pages, 3 figures, 1 Tabl

An efficient ring polymer contraction scheme for imaginary time path integral simulations.

A quantum simulation of an imaginary time path integral typically requires around n times more computational effort than the corresponding classical simulation, where n is the number of ring polymer beads (or imaginary time slices) used in the calculation. However, this estimate neglects the fact that the potential energies of many systems can be decomposed into a sum of rapidly varying short-range and slowly varying long-range contributions. For such systems, the computational effort of the path integral simulation can be reduced considerably by evaluating the long-range forces on a contracted ring polymer with fewer beads than are needed to evaluate the short-range forces. This idea is developed and then illustrated with an application to a flexible model of liquid water in which the intramolecular forces are evaluated with 32 beads, the oxygen-oxygen Lennard-Jones forces with seven, and the intermolecular electrostatic forces with just five. The resulting static and dynamic properties are within a few percent of those of a full 32-bead calculation, and yet they are obtained with a computational effort less than six times (rather than 32 times) that of a classical simulation. We hope that this development will encourage future studies of quantum mechanical fluctuations in liquid water and aqueous solutions and in many other systems with similar interaction potentials

A refined ring polymer contraction scheme for systems with electrostatic interactions

We have recently shown how path integral simulations can be streamlined by decomposing the potential into a sum of rapidly-varying short-range and slowly-varying long-range contributions. Here, we introduce an efficient way to perform this decomposition for systems with electrostatic interactions and illustrate the method with an application to a flexible water model. In the limit of large system size, where the calculation of long-range forces dominates, the present method enables path integral simulations of liquid water to be performed with less than twice the computational effort of classical molecular dynamics simulations. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

A fast path integral method for polarizable force fields.

A quantum simulation of an imaginary time path integral typically requires around n times more computational effort than the corresponding classical simulation, where n is the number of ring polymer beads (or imaginary time slices) used in the calculation. It is however possible to improve on this estimate by decomposing the potential into a sum of slowly and rapidly varying contributions. If the slowly varying contribution changes only slightly over the length scale of the ring polymer, it can be evaluated on a contracted ring polymer with fewer than the full n beads (or equivalently on a lower order Fourier decomposition of the imaginary time path). Here we develop and test this idea for systems with polarizable force fields. The development consists of iterating the induction on the contracted ring polymer and applying an appropriate transformation to obtain the forces on the original n beads. In combination with a splitting of the Coulomb potential into its short- and long-range parts, this results in a method with little more than classical computational effort in the limit of large system size. The method is illustrated with simulations of liquid water at 300 K and hexagonal ice at 100 K using a recently developed flexible and polarizable Thole-type potential energy model

Quantum glass forging

Intuition suggests that the occurrence of large quantum fluctuations should prevent a material from forming a glass, yet theory and simulations that explicitly incorporate such fluctuations suggest the opposite could be true

i-PI 2.0: a universal force engine for advanced molecular simulations

Progress in the atomic-scale modeling of matter over the past decade has been tremendous. This progress has been brought about by improvements in methods for evaluating interatomic forces that work by either solving the electronic structure problem explicitly, or by computing accurate approximations of the solution and by the development of techniques that use the Born–Oppenheimer (BO) forces to move the atoms on the BO potential energy surface. As a consequence of these developments it is now possible to identify stable or metastable states, to sample configurations consistent with the appropriate thermodynamic ensemble, and to estimate the kinetics of reactions and phase transitions. All too often, however, progress is slowed down by the bottleneck associated with implementing new optimization algorithms and/or sampling techniques into the many existing electronic-structure and empirical-potential codes. To address this problem, we are thus releasing a new version of the i-PI software. This piece of software is an easily extensible framework for implementing advanced atomistic simulation techniques using interatomic potentials and forces calculated by an external driver code. While the original version of the code (Ceriotti et al., 2014) was developed with a focus on path integral molecular dynamics techniques, this second release of i-PI not only includes several new advanced path integral methods, but also offers other classes of algorithms. In other words, i-PI is moving towards becoming a universal force engine that is both modular and tightly coupled to the driver codes that evaluate the potential energy surface and its derivatives. Program summary: Program Title: i-PI Program Files doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.17632/x792grbm9g.1 Licensing provisions: GPLv3, MIT Programming language: Python External routines/libraries: NumPy Nature of problem: Lowering the implementation barrier to bring state-of-the-art sampling and atomistic modeling techniques to ab initio and empirical potentials programs. Solution method: Advanced sampling methods, including path-integral molecular dynamics techniques, are implemented in a Python interface. Any electronic structure code can be patched to receive the atomic coordinates from the Python interface, and to return the forces and energy that are used to integrate the equations of motion, optimize atomic geometries, etc. Restrictions: This code does not compute interatomic potentials, although the distribution includes sample driver codes that can be used to test different techniques using a few simple model force fields