ATK-ForceField is a software package for atomistic simulations using classical interatomic potentials. It is implemented as a part of the Atomistix ToolKit (ATK), which is a Python programming environment that makes it easy to create and analyze both standard and highly customized simulations. This paper will focus on the atomic interaction potentials, molecular dynamics, and geometry optimization features of the software, however, many more advanced modeling features are available. The implementation details of these algorithms and their computational performance will be shown. We present three illustrative examples of the types of calculations that are possible with ATK-ForceField: modeling thermal transport properties in a silicon germanium crystal, vapor deposition of selenium molecules on a selenium surface, and a simulation of creep in a copper polycrystal.
We introduce a novel class of localized atomic environment representations, based upon the Coulomb matrix. By combining these functions with the Gaussian approximation potential approach, we present LC-GAP, a new system for generating atomic potentials through machine learning (ML). Tests on the QM7, QM7b and GDB9 biomolecular datasets demonstrate that potentials created with LC-GAP can successfully predict atomization energies for molecules larger than those used for training to chemical accuracy, and can (in the case of QM7b) also be used to predict a range of other atomic properties with accuracy in line with the recent literature. As the best-performing representation has only linear dimensionality in the number of atoms in a local atomic environment, this represents an improvement both in prediction accuracy and computational cost when considered against similar Coulomb matrix-based methods.
Determining whether two particle systems are similar is a common problem in particle simulations. When the comparison should be invariant under permutations, orthogonal transformations, and translations of the systems, special techniques are needed. We present an algorithm that can test particle systems of finite size for similarity and, if they are similar, can find the optimal alignment between them. Our approach is based on an invariant version of the root mean square deviation (RMSD) measure and is capable of finding the globally optimal solution in O(n 3 ) operations where n is the number of three-dimensional particles.
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