title: Determination of the chemical potential using energy-biased sampling.
abstract: An energy-biased method to evaluate ensemble averages requiring test-particle insertion is presented. The method is based on biasing the sampling within the subdomains of the test-particle configurational space with energies smaller than a given value freely assigned. These energy wells are located via unbiased random insertion over the whole configurational space and are sampled using the so-called Hit-and-Run algorithm, which uniformly samples compact regions of any shape immersed in a space of arbitrary dimensions. Because the bias is defined in terms of the energy landscape it can be exactly corrected to obtain the unbiased distribution. The test-particle energy distribution is then combined with the Bennett relation for the evaluation of the chemical potential. We apply this protocol to a system with relatively small probability of low-energy test-particle insertion, liquid argon at high density and low temperature, and show that the energy-biased Bennett method is around five times more efficient than the standard Bennett method. A similar performance gain is observed in the reconstruction of the energy distribution.
authors.affiliation: Departamento Ciencias y Técnicas Fisicoquímicas, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Paseo Senda del Rey 9, Madrid 28040, Spain. r.delgado-buscalioni@ucl.ac.uk
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Delgado-Buscalioni
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: De Fabritiis
authors.forename: P V
authors.initials: PV
authors.lastname: Coveney