Free energy calculations implementation issues

The fundamental issue in implementing importance sampling in simulations is the proper choice of the biased distribution, or, equivalently, the weighting factor, q. A variety of ingenious techniques that lead to great improvement in the efficiency and accuracy of free energy calculations have been developed for this purpose. They will be mentioned frequently throughout this book. 

A further issue arises in the Cl solvation models, because Cl wavefunction is not completely variational (the orbital variational parameter have a fixed value during the Cl coefficient optimization). In contrast with completely variational methods (HF/MFSCF), the Cl approach presents two nonequivalent ways of evaluating the value of a first-order observable, such as the electronic density of the nonlinear term of the effective Hamiltonian (Equation 1.107). The first approach (the so called unrelaxed density method) evaluates the electronic density as an expectation value using the Cl wavefunction coefficients. In contrast, the second approach, the so-called relaxed density method, evaluates the electronic density as a derivative of the free-energy functional [18], As a consequence, there should be two nonequivalent approaches to the calculation of the solvent reaction field induced by the molecular solute. The unrelaxed density approach is by far the simplest to implement and all the Cl solvation models described above have been based on this method. 

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