Accelerating equilibrium isotope effect calculations: II. Stochastic implementation of direct estimators

TL;DR

This paper introduces a stochastic implementation of direct estimators to accelerate equilibrium isotope effect calculations, reducing errors and enabling analysis of larger isotope effects with improved accuracy.

Contribution

It combines stochastic change of mass with direct estimators to decrease statistical errors, providing a comprehensive comparison of methods on models and real molecules.

Findings

Stochastic direct estimators perform well for large isotope effects.

The method reduces thermodynamic integration errors effectively.

Surprising robustness of direct estimators for a wide range of isotope effects.

Abstract

Path integral calculations of equilibrium isotope effects and isotopic fractionation are expensive due to the presence of path integral discretization errors, statistical errors, and thermodynamic integration errors. Whereas the discretization errors can be reduced by high-order factorization of the path integral and statistical errors by using centroid virial estimators, two recent papers proposed alternative ways to completely remove the thermodynamic integration errors: Cheng and Ceriotti [J. Chem. Phys. 141, 244112 (2015)] employed a variant of free-energy perturbation called "direct estimators," while Karandashev and Van\'{\i}\v{c}ek [J. Chem. Phys. 143, 194104 (2017)] combined the thermodynamic integration with a stochastic change of mass and piecewise-linear umbrella biasing potential. Here we combine the former approach with the stochastic change of mass in order to decrease its statistical errors when applied to larger isotope effects, and perform a thorough comparison of different methods by computing isotope effects first on a harmonic model, and then on methane and methanium, where we evaluate all isotope effects of the form $\mathrm{CH}_{\mathrm{4-x}}\mathrm{D}_{\mathrm{x}}/\mathrm{CH}_{4}$ and $\mathrm{CH}_{\mathrm{5-x}}\mathrm{D}^{+}_{\mathrm{x}}/\mathrm{CH}^{+}_{5}$, respectively. We discuss thoroughly the reasons for a surprising behavior of the original method of direct estimators, which performed well for a much larger range of isotope effects than what had been expected previously.