Free energy from constrained molecular dynamics

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Activated processes can be studied in the molecular dynamics (MD) approach by imposing a mechanical constraint on the corresponding reaction coordinate and by performing a kind of thermodynamic integration. The blue-moon ensemble method provides us with the correct algorithm for computing the potential of mean force and the transmission coefficient. Here we show a procedure for obtaining the mean force directly from the average force of constraint and a geometric correction term which is easy to compute in MD simulations. Previous work on the same problem will be also discussed.