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Exploring the origins of the power-law properties of energy landscapes:
An egg-box model
Claire P. Massen, Jonathan P. K. Doye and R. W. Nash
Physica A 382, 683-692 (2007)
Abstract
Multidimensional potential energy landscapes (PELs) have a Gaussian distribution for the energies of the minima, but at the same time the distribution of the hyperareas for the basins of attraction surrounding the minima follows a power-law. To explore how both these features can simultaneously be true, we introduce an ``egg-box'' model. In these model landscapes, the Gaussian energy distribution is used as a starting point and we examine whether a power-law basin area distribution can arise as a natural consequence through the swallowing up of higher-energy minima by larger low-energy basins when the variance of this Gaussian is increased sufficiently. Although the basin area distribution is substantially broadened by this process,it is insufficient to generate power-laws, highlighting the role played by the inhomogeneous distribution of basins in configuration space for actual PELs.
The full paper is available from
Physica A and
arXiv.org.
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