Accelerating rare events while overcoming the low-barrier problem using a temperature program

Abstract

We present a hierarchical coarse-grained simulation technique called the temperature programmed molecular dynamics (TPMD) method for accelerating molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of rare events. The method is targeted towards materials where a system visits many times a collection of energy basins in the potential energy surface, called a superbasin, via low-barrier moves before escaping to a new superbasin via a high-barrier move. The superbasin escape events are rare at the MD time scales. The low-barrier moves become accessible to MD by employing a temperature program, i.e., the MD temperature changes during the simulation. Once a superbasin is detected, transitions within the superbasin are ignored, in effect causing coarse-graining of basins. The temperature program enables the system to escape from the superbasin with reduced computational cost thereby overcoming the "low-barrier" problem. The main advantage of our approach is that the superbasin-to-superbasin transitions are accurately obtained at the original temperature with a reasonable computational cost. We study surface diffusion in Ag/Ag(001) system and demonstrate the ability of the TPMD method to span a wide-range of timescales.