A Partition Function Estimator
Statistical Mechanics
2024-09-05 v1 Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
Abstract
We propose a simple estimator that allows to calculate the absolute value of a system's partition function from a finite sampling of its canonical ensemble. The estimator utilizes a volume correction term to compensate the effect that the finite sampling cannot cover the whole configuration space. As a proof of concept, the estimator is applied to calculate the partition function for several model systems, and the results are compared with the numerically exact solutions. Excellent agreement is found, demonstrating that a solution for an efficient calculation of partition functions is possible.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2409.02538,
title = {A Partition Function Estimator},
author = {Ying-Chih Chiang and Frank Otto and Jonathan W. Essex},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.02538},
year = {2024}
}