This collection of lectures and tutorial reviews by renowned experts focusses on the common computational approaches in use to unravel the static and dynamical behaviour of complex physical systems at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology. Paradigmatic examples of condensed matter physics are spin and structural glasses and protein folding, as well as their aggregation and adsorption to hard and soft surfaces, in physico-chemical biology.
Among the most prominent joint key features of the systems considered in this volume are rugged free-energy landscapes. These generate metastability and are often responsible for very slow dynamics allowing for the system to be trapped in one of the many available local minima.
The challenge set forth by the authors of this volume is to provide a common basis and technical language for the (computational) technology transfer between the fields and systems considered.
Author(s): Wolfhard Janke (auth.)
Series: Lecture Notes in Physics 736
Edition: 1
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 412
Tags: Partially Ordered Systems, Glasses, Quasicrystals;Statistical Physics;Numerical and Computational Methods;Biophysics/Biomedical Physics
Front Matter....Pages I-X
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Rugged Free-Energy Landscapes – An Introduction....Pages 1-7
Front Matter....Pages 9-9
Some Aspects of Infinite-Range Models of Spin Glasses: Theory and Numerical Simulations....Pages 11-46
The Potts Glass Model: A Scenario for the Freezing Transition of Structural Glasses?....Pages 47-65
Domain Walls, Droplets and Barriers in Two-Dimensional Ising Spin Glasses....Pages 67-106
Local Scale-Invariance in Disordered Systems....Pages 107-146
Front Matter....Pages 147-147
Transport of Mobile Particles in an Immobile Environment: Computer Simulations of Sodium Silicates....Pages 149-171
The Gonihedric Ising Model and Glassiness....Pages 173-199
Front Matter....Pages 201-201
Thermodynamics of Protein Folding from Coarse-Grained Models’ Perspectives....Pages 203-246
Exact Energy Landscapes of Proteins Using a Coarse-Grained Model....Pages 247-268
Protein Folding, Unfolding and Aggregation Studied Using an All-Atom Model with~a~Simplified Interaction Potential....Pages 269-291
All-Atom Simulations of Proteins....Pages 293-313
Front Matter....Pages 315-315
Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods for Simulations of Biomolecules....Pages 317-351
A Different Approach to Monte Carlo Simulations in Systems with Complex Free-Energy Landscapes....Pages 353-368
Generalized-Ensemble Algorithms for Protein Folding Simulations....Pages 369-407
Back Matter....Pages 409-412
