Understanding Free Energy Calculations

Two concepts are helpful in understanding and characterizing relative free energy computational errors phase space relationships and probability distribution functions of perturbations. 

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As we have already pointed out, the theoretical basis of free energy calculations were laid a long time ago [1,4,5], but, quite understandably, had to wait for sufficient computational capabilities to be applied to molecular systems of interest to the chemist, the physicist, and the biologist. In the meantime, these calculations were the domain of analytical theories. The most useful in practice were perturbation theories of dense liquids. In the Barker-Henderson theory [13], the reference state was chosen to be a hard-sphere fluid. The subsequent Weeks-Chandler-Andersen theory [14] differed from the Barker-Henderson approach by dividing the intermolecular potential such that its unperturbed and perturbed parts were associated with repulsive and attractive forces, respectively. This division yields slower variation of the perturbation term with intermolecular separation and, consequently, faster convergence of the perturbation series than the division employed by Barker and Henderson. 

Characterizing, Understanding, and Improving Free Energy Calculations... 

The sample size in a real simulation is always finite, and usually relatively small. Thus, understanding the error behavior in the finite-size sampling region is critical for free energy calculations based on molecular simulation. Despite the importance of finite sampling bias, it has received little attention from the community of molecular simulators. Consequently, we would like to emphasize the importance of finite sampling bias (accuracy) in this chapter. 

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