title: Low-temperature structural transitions: circumventing the broken-ergodicity problem.
abstract: We consider systems undergoing very-low-temperature solid-solid transitions, exhibiting the well-known "broken-ergodicity" problem that is often so severe that even the replica exchange method converges too slowly. We propose an improvement of the latter, which consists of coupling the lower-temperature random walks to analytically generated random walks corresponding to an auxiliary harmonic superposition system. Numerically accurate results are obtained for several Lennard-Jones clusters, which have so far been treated only by the harmonic superposition approximation.
authors.affiliation: Chemistry Department, University of California at Irvine, Irvine, California 92697, USA.
authors.forename: Vladimir A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Sharapov
authors.forename: Dario
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Meluzzi
authors.forename: Vladimir A
authors.initials: VA
authors.lastname: Mandelshtam