RUGGED FREE ENERGY LANDSCAPES: COMMON COMPUTATIONAL APPROACHES TO SPIN GLASSES, STRUCTURAL GLASSES AND BIOLOGICAL MACROMOLECULES

This volume on spin glasses, structural glasses and biological macromolecules collects pedagogically written lecture notes of internationally renowned - perts from eight countries, who work on di?erent physical problems but - ploy similar theoretical concepts and computational methods. The research into at ?rst sight quite di?erent physical phenomena, therefore, faces related problems, whose origin can be traced back to the di?culties of numerical simulations of systems with rugged free-energy landscapes. Many of the or- inal publications presuppose quite specialized “common” knowledge, usually readily accessible only to the experts in each of these ?elds. Moreover, they are typically published in quite di?erent sets of scienti?c journals. The main objective of these Lecture Notes is, therefore, to provide the necessary ba- ground material in a coherent fashion and thereby to initialize knowledge transfer of advanced methodologies across the boundaries of the disciplines. It can be anticipated that future successful computer simulation studies of static and dynamic properties of the three systems considered here as well as the further development of improved numerical algorithms will greatly pro?t from an interaction among researchers in these di?erent ?elds. More speci?cally, the merits and drawbacksof the various variants of g- eralized ensemble methods as employed in computational studies of glassy systems and biomolecules as well as the complicated interplay of di?erent - gorithms in combined methods are discussed from rather di?erent viewpoints in this volume.

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.