Brian Van Koten

Brian Van Koten, Mitchell Luskin

The development of patch test consistent quasicontinuum energies for multi-dimensional crystalline solids modeled by many-body potentials remains a challenge. The original quasicontinuum energy (QCE) has been implemented for many-body potentials in two and three space dimensions, but it is not patch test consistent. We propose that by blending the atomistic and corresponding Cauchy-Born continuum models of QCE in an interfacial region with thickness of a small number $k$ of blended atoms, a general quasicontinuum energy (BQCE) can be developed with the potential to significantly improve the accuracy of QCE near lattice instabilities such as dislocation formation and motion. In this paper, we give an error analysis of the blended quasicontinuum energy (BQCE) for a periodic one-dimensional chain of atoms with next-nearest neighbor interactions. Our analysis includes the optimization of the blending function for an improved convergence rate. We show that the $\ell^2$ strain error for the non-blended QCE energy (QCE), which has low order $\text{O}(ε^{1/2})$ where $ε$ is the atomistic length scale, can be reduced by a factor of $k^{3/2}$ for an optimized blending function where $k$ is the number of atoms in the blending region. The QCE energy has been further shown to suffer from a O$(1)$ error in the critical strain at which the lattice loses stability. We prove that the error in the critical strain of BQCE can be reduced by a factor of $k^2$ for an optimized blending function, thus demonstrating that the BQCE energy for an optimized blending function has the potential to give an accurate approximation of the deformation near lattice instabilities such as crack growth.

Brian Van Koten, Xingjie Helen Li, Mitchell Luskin et al.

We give computational results to study the accuracy of several quasicontinuum methods for two benchmark problems - the stability of a Lomer dislocation pair under shear and the stability of a lattice to plastic slip under tensile loading. We find that our theoretical analysis of the accuracy near instabilities for one-dimensional model problems can successfully explain most of the computational results for these multi-dimensional benchmark problems. However, we also observe some clear discrepancies, which suggest the need for additional theoretical analysis and benchmark problems to more thoroughly understand the accuracy of quasicontinuum methods.

Derek Olson, Xingjie Li, Christoph Ortner et al.

We formulate the blended force-based quasicontinuum (BQCF) method for multilattices and develop rigorous error estimates in terms of the approximation parameters: atomistic region, blending region and continuum finite element mesh. Balancing the approximation parameters yields a convergent atomistic/continuum multiscale method for multilattices with point defects, including a rigorous convergence rate in terms of the computational cost. The analysis is illustrated with numerical results for a Stone--Wales defect in graphene.

Brian Van Koten, Christoph Ortner

We show that the Cauchy--Born model of a single-species 2-lattice is second order if the atomistic and continuum kinematics are connected in a novel way. Our proof uses a generalization to 2-lattices of the point symmetry of Bravais lattices. Moreover, by identifying similar symmetries in multi-species pair interaction models, we construct a new stored energy density, using shift-gradients but not strain gradients, that is also second order accurate. These results can be used to develop highly accurate continuum models and atomistic/continuum coupling methods for materials such as graphene, hcp metals, and shape memory alloys.

Brian Van Koten, Mitchell Luskin

We analyze the convergence of the string method of E, Ren, and Vanden-Eijnden to a minimum energy path. Under some assumptions relating to the critical points on the minimum energy path, we show that the string method initialized in a neighborhood of the minimum energy path converges to an arbitrarily small neighborhood of the minimum energy path as the number of images is increased.

Gabriel Earle, Brian Van Koten

Motivated by challenges arising in molecular simulation, we study reactive trajectories of the overdamped Langevin dynamics, i.e. trajectories observed as they pass from a set A corresponding to the reagents of a chemical reaction to a set B corresponding to the products. Reactive trajectories are known to have the same distribution as trajectories of the overdamped Langevin dynamics biased by a singular drift related to the committor function. In this work, we assess the effect of replacing the exact singular drift with an approximation based on an approximate committor function. We derive a convenient formula for the relative entropy between the distributions of exact and approximate reactive trajectories, and we propose a stochastic gradient descent method for minimizing the entropy to train an approximate committor function on the fly while computing reactive trajectories. We also devise a model assessment procedure for comparing the qualities of different approximations to the committor function based on the relative entropy.

Erik Thiede, Brian Van Koten, Jonathan Weare

For many Markov chains of practical interest, the invariant distribution is extremely sensitive to perturbations of some entries of the transition matrix, but insensitive to others; we give an example of such a chain, motivated by a problem in computational statistical physics. We have derived perturbation bounds on the relative error of the invariant distribution that reveal these variations in sensitivity. Our bounds are sharp, we do not impose any structural assumptions on the transition matrix or on the perturbation, and computing the bounds has the same complexity as computing the invariant distribution or computing other bounds in the literature. Moreover, our bounds have a simple interpretation in terms of hitting times, which can be used to draw intuitive but rigorous conclusions about the sensitivity of a chain to various types of perturbations.