An automated nudged elastic band method

A robust, efficient, dynamic, and automated nudged elastic band (AutoNEB) algorithm to effectively locate transition states is presented. The strength of the algorithm is its ability to use fewer resources than the nudged elastic band (NEB) method by focusing first on converging a rough path before improving upon the resolution around the transition state. To demonstrate its efficiency, it has been benchmarked using a simple diffusion problem and a dehydrogenation reaction. In both cases, the total number of force evaluations used by the AutoNEB method is significantly less than the NEB method. Furthermore, it is shown that for a fast and robust relaxation to the transition state, a climbing image elastic band method where the full spring force, rather than only the component parallel to the local tangent to the path, is preferred especially for pathways through energy landscapes with multiple local minima. The resulting corner cutting does not affect the accuracy of the transition state as long as this is located with the climbing image method. Finally, a number of pitfalls often encountered while locating the true transition state of a reaction are discussed in terms of systematically exploring the multidimensional energy landscape of a given process.