Using reweighting and free energy surface interpolation to predict solid-solid phase diagrams.

Many physical properties of small organic molecules are dependent on the current crystal packing, or polymorph, of the material, including bioavailability of pharmaceuticals, optical properties of dyes, and charge transport properties of semiconductors. Predicting the most stable crystalline form at a given temperature and pressure requires determining the crystalline form with the lowest relative Gibbs free energy. Effective computational prediction of the most stable polymorph could save significant time and effort in the design of novel molecular crystalline solids or predict their behavior under new conditions.

Generalized Temporal Acceleration Scheme for Kinetic Monte Carlo Simulations of Surface Catalytic Processes by Scaling the Rates of Fast Reactions.

A novel algorithm is presented that achieves temporal acceleration during kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations of surface catalytic processes. This algorithm allows for the direct simulation of reaction networks containing kinetic processes occurring on vastly disparate time scales which computationally overburden standard KMC methods. Previously developed methods for temporal acceleration in KMC were designed for specific systems and often require a priori information from the user such as identifying the fast and slow processes.

Effects of a More Accurate Polarizable Hamiltonian on Polymorph Free Energies Computed Efficiently by Reweighting Point-Charge Potentials.

We examine the free energies of three benzene polymorphs as a function of temperature in the point-charge OPLS-AA and GROMOS54A7 potentials as well as the polarizable AMOEBA09 potential. For this system, using a polarizable Hamiltonian instead of the cheaper point-charge potentials is shown to have a significantly smaller effect on the stability at 250 K than on the lattice energy at 0 K. The benzene I polymorph is found to be the most stable crystal structure in all three potentials examined and at all temperatures examined.

Comparison of Methods To Reweight from Classical Molecular Simulations to QM/MM Potentials.

We examine methods to reweight classical molecular mechanics solvation calculations to more expensive QM/MM energy functions. We first consider the solvation free energy difference between ethane and methanol in a QM/MM Hamiltonian from configurations generated in a cheaper MM potential. The solute molecules in the QM/MM Hamiltonian are treated with B3LYP/6-31G*, and the solvent water molecules are treated classically.