Generating Transition Paths by Langevin Bridges

Abstract: We propose a novel stochastic method to generate paths conditioned to start in an initial state and end in a given final state during a certain time $t_{f}$. These paths are weighted with a probability given by the overdamped Langevin dynamics. We show that these paths can be exactly generated by a non-local stochastic differential equation. In the limit of short times, we show that this complicated non-solvable equation can be simplified into an approximate stochastic differential equation. For longer times, the paths generated by this approximate equation can be reweighted to generate the correct statistics. In all cases, the paths generated by this equation are statistically independent and provide a representative sample of transition paths. In case the reaction takes place in a solvent (e.g. protein folding in water), the explicit solvent can be treated. The method is illustrated on the one-dimensional quartic oscillator.