Designed-walk replica-exchange method for simulations of complex systems

Abstract: We propose a new implementation of the replica-exchange method (REM) in which replicas follow a pre-planned route in temperature space instead of a random walk. Our method satisfies the detailed balance condition in the proposed route. The method forces tunneling events between the highest and lowest temperatures to happen with an almost constant period. The number of tunneling counts is proportional to that of the random-walk REM multiplied by the square root of moving distance in temperature space. We applied this new implementation to two kinds of REM and compared the results with those of the conventional random-walk REM. The test system was a two-dimensional Ising model, and our new method reproduced the results of the conventional random-walk REM and improved the tunneling counts by three times or more than that of the random-walk REM.