Abstract:

An adaptive string method is proposed based on the string method. In this method,a moving mesh meth-od is adopted to control the tangent movement of mesh points.Bigger density of the mesh points near these states can be obtained by choosing an appropriate monitor function in the moving mesh method, thus accurately locating the positions of the critical points on the minimal energy path and calculating the energies at the critical points. The proposed method is then applied to the study of the double well potential system and the Mueller potential problem.The results show that the proposed method is a reliable numerical method for studying rare events in complex sys-tems.

Key words: rare event, transition path, minimal energy path, adaptive string method