title: A fast tomographic method for searching the minimum free energy path.
abstract: Minimum Free Energy Path (MFEP) provides a lot of important information about the chemical reactions, like the free energy barrier, the location of the transition state, and the relative stability between reactant and product. With MFEP, one can study the mechanisms of the reaction in an efficient way. Due to a large number of degrees of freedom, searching the MFEP is a very time-consuming process. Here, we present a fast tomographic method to perform the search. Our approach first calculates the free energy surfaces in a sequence of hyperplanes perpendicular to a transition path. Based on an objective function and the free energy gradient, the transition path is optimized in the collective variable space iteratively. Applications of the present method to model systems show that our method is practical. It can be an alternative approach for finding the state-to-state MFEP.
authors.affiliation: Biomolecular Physics and Modeling Group, School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, China.
authors.forename: Changjun
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Biomolecular Physics and Modeling Group, School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, China.
authors.forename: Yanzhao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.affiliation: School of Fashion, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan 430073, Hubei, China.
authors.forename: Xuewei
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jiang
authors.affiliation: Biomolecular Physics and Modeling Group, School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, Hubei, China.
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Xiao