Rethinking Metadynamics: from Bias Potentials to Probability Distributions.

By Michele Invernizzi, Michele Parrinello. Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, 2019

311 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Metadynamics is an enhanced sampling method of great popularity, based on the on-the-fly construction of a bias potential that is function of a selected number of collective variables. We propose here a change in perspective that shifts the focus from the bias to the probability distribution reconstruction, while keeping some of the key characteristics of metadynamics, such as the flexible on-the-fly adjustments to the free energy estimate. The result is an enhanced sampling method that presents a drastic improvement in convergence speed, especially when dealing with suboptimal and/or multidimensional sets of collective variables. The method is especially robust and easy to use, in fact it requires only few simple parameters to be set, and it has a straightforward reweighting scheme to recover the statistics of the unbiased ensemble. Furthermore it gives more control on the desired exploration of the phase space, since the deposited bias is not allowed to grow indefinitely and it does not push the simulation to uninteresting high free energy regions. We demonstrate the performance of the method in a number of representative examples.

Subfields: Condensed Matter Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/568c1c5f216a49bf9198bc59ff8893deb068c22e

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In Condensed Matter Physics

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Citations in the corpus

Enhanced Sampling Methods for Molecular Dynamics Simulations [Article v1.0] (2022, methodology): “Among methods that we can categorise as ABP methods are local elevation [107], energy landscape paving [108], selfhealing umbrella sampling [109, 110], adaptive biasing MD (ABMD) [111], Gaussian-mixture umbrella sampling [112], the adaptive biasing potential method [113], basis function sampling [11”