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Ensemble distribution is sharply peaked in some regions of the phase space, and is very small, virtually zero in the most of it.
For liquid, for instance, only the configurations without overlaps are possible. That means, that applying simple Monte Carlo approach to our problems is not very helpful.
The cure is to sample the relevant configurations only. We can create a random walk in the phase space, sampling it with the ensemble distribution.
Then, the ensemble average, would be just the average over all
points , generated by this random walk:
Designing a random walk means to specify the algorithm to go from the
current point to the next
.
If the transition probability to go from
to
in
one step is
, and the probability density at the n-th step is
, we
can write the ``master equation'' for our random walk:
![]() |
(2) |
Any random process with the transition probability satisfying equation (2) would serve our purpose, but we want to go the easy way. We'll try to construct the random walk, that satisfies more strict condition of the detailed balance. Instead of solving the integral equation for W, we make W satisfy the following:
Detailed balance is a sufficient, but not necessary condition
for a random process to sample the phase space with the probability
density . Any scheme, satisfying (3)
will do it for sure, but it does not mean, that if a random
process does not satisfy (3), it's probability
density P cannot be proportional to
.
There is more than one solution for W to satisfy detailed balance.
Most of the MC methods do so, as this is the safest
way to make a Monte Carlo simulation. It guarantees success..
Here are two examples
()
is an arbitrary constant. If there is any dynamic
interpretation of the MC simulation,
can be taken as a time
scale corresponding to one MC step. The second example
(4) is the basis of the famous Metropolis Monte
Carlo algorithm
© 1997 Boris Veytsman and Michael Kotelyanskii