Interactive chemical reactivity exploration.

Elucidating chemical reactivity in complex molecular assemblies of a few hundred atoms is, despite the remarkable progress in quantum chemistry, still a major challenge. Black-box search methods to find intermediates and transition-state structures might fail in such situations because of the high-dimensionality of the potential energy surface. Here, we propose the concept of interactive chemical reactivity exploration to effectively introduce the chemist's intuition into the search process. We employ a haptic pointer device with force feedback to allow the operator the direct manipulation of structures in three dimensions along with simultaneous perception of the quantum mechanical response upon structure modification as forces. We elaborate on the details of how such an interactive exploration should proceed and which technical difficulties need to be overcome. All reactivity-exploration concepts developed for this purpose have been implemented in the samson programming environment.

Block-adaptive quantum mechanics: an adaptive divide-and-conquer approach to interactive quantum chemistry.

We present a novel Block-Adaptive Quantum Mechanics (BAQM) approach to interactive quantum chemistry. Although quantum chemistry models are known to be computationally demanding, we achieve interactive rates by focusing computational resources on the most active parts of the system. BAQM is based on a divide-and-conquer technique and constrains some nucleus positions and some electronic degrees of freedom on the fly to simplify the simulation. As a result, each time step may be performed significantly faster, which in turn may accelerate attraction to the neighboring local minima. By applying our approach to the nonself-consistent Atom Superposition and Electron Delocalization Molecular Orbital theory, we demonstrate interactive rates and efficient virtual prototyping for systems containing more than a thousand of atoms on a standard desktop computer.

Interactive quantum chemistry: a divide-and-conquer ASED-MO method.

We present interactive quantum chemistry simulation at the atom superposition and electron delocalization molecular orbital (ASED-MO) level of theory. Our method is based on the divide-and-conquer (D&C) approach, which we show is accurate and efficient for this non-self-consistent semiempirical theory. The method has a linear complexity in the number of atoms, scales well with the number of cores, and has a small prefactor. The time cost is completely controllable, as all steps are performed with direct algorithms, i.e., no iterative schemes are used. We discuss the errors induced by the D&C approach, first empirically on a few examples, and then via a theoretical study of two toy models that can be analytically solved for any number of atoms. Thanks to the precision and speed of the D&C approach, we are able to demonstrate interactive quantum chemistry simulations for systems up to a few hundred atoms on a current multicore desktop computer. When drawing and editing molecular systems, interactive simulations provide immediate, intuitive feedback on chemical structures. As the number of cores on personal computers increases, and larger and larger systems can be dealt with, we believe such interactive simulations-even at lower levels of theory-should thus prove most useful to effectively understand, design and prototype molecules, devices and materials.