Related papers: Minimum Energy Paths and Transition States by Curv…

We present a method to sample reactive pathways via biased molecular dynamics simulations in trajectory space. We show that the use of enhanced sampling techniques enables unconstrained exploration of multiple reaction routes. Time…

The time evolution of many physical, chemical, and biological systems can be modelled by stochastic transitions between the minima of the potential energy surface describing the system of interest. We show that in cases where there are two…

The essence of a chemical reaction lies in the redistribution and reorganization of electrons, which is often manifested through electron transfer or the migration of electron pairs. These changes are inherently discrete and abrupt in the…

Synthesis remains a challenge for advancing materials science. A key focus of this challenge is how to enable selective synthesis, particularly as it pertains to metastable materials. This perspective addresses the question: how can…

Understanding the transition events between metastable states in complex systems is an important subject in the fields of computational physics, chemistry and biology. The transition pathway plays an important role in characterizing the…

Many algorithms for finding reaction pathways require an initial estimate of the minimum energy path (MEP). Most estimation methods use a variational approach and thus must be seeded from an even simpler path, such as one generated by…

We study merchant energy production modeled as a compound switching and timing option. The resulting Markov decision process is intractable. State-of-the-art approximate dynamic programming methods applied to realistic instances of this…

We consider the problem of a particle traveling from an initial configuration to a final configuration (given by a point in the plane along with a prescribed velocity vector) in minimum time with non-homogeneous velocity and with…

Transition path theory provides a statistical description of the dynamics of a reaction in terms of local spatial quantities. In its original formulation, it is limited to reactions that consist of trajectories flowing from a reactant set A…

Molecular motors transduce chemical energy obtained from hydrolizing ATP into mechanical work exerted against an external force. We calculate their efficiency at maximum power output for two simple generic models and show that the…

Chemical reactions can be modelled via diffusion processes conditioned to make a transition between specified molecular configurations representing the state of the system before and after the chemical reaction. In particular the model of…

The discovery of transition pathways to unravel distinct reaction mechanisms and, in general, rare events that occur in molecular systems is still a challenge. Recent advances have focused on analyzing the transition path ensemble using the…

Efficient and reliable identification and optimization of transition state structures is a longstanding challenge in computational chemistry. Popular chain-of-states methods require hundreds if not thousands of ab initio calculations to…

Stable states in complex systems correspond to local minima on the associated potential energy surface. Transitions between these local minima govern the dynamics of such systems. Precisely determining the transition pathways in complex and…

We perform quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations to determine minimum energy pathways of simple chemical reactions, and compare the computed geometries and reaction barriers with those obtained with density functional theory (DFT) and…

Chemical reactions modeled by ordinary differential equations are finite-dimensional dissipative dynamical systems with multiple time-scales. They are numerically hard to tackle -- especially when they enter an optimal control problem as…

Transition state theory is a standard framework for predicting the rate of a chemical reaction. Although the transition state theory has been successfully applied to numerous chemical reaction analyses, many experimental and theoretical…

A strategy for finding transition paths connecting two stable basins is presented. The starting point is the Hamilton principle of stationary action; we show how it can be transformed into a minimum principle through the addition of…

When examining dynamics occurring at non-zero temperatures, both energy and entropy must be taken into account while describing activated barrier crossing events. Furthermore, good reaction coordinates need to be constructed to describe…

Simulating chemical reactions is a central challenge in computational chemistry, characterized by an uneven difficulty profile: while equilibrium reactant and product geometries are often classically tractable, intermediate transition…