Mathematics Colloquia and Seminars

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The dynamical behavior of many systems arising in physics, chemistry, biology, etc. is dominated by rare but important transition events between long lived states. Important examples include nucleation events during phase transition, conformational changes of macromolecules, or chemical reactions. Understanding the mechanism and determining the rate of these transitions is a major theoretical and computational challenge that has attracted a lot of attention for many years. In this talk, I will discuss the theoretical background and algorithmic details of the finite- temperature string method, which gives a firm theoretical background to the concept of reaction coordinate to describe these transitions, and allows to determine their pathways and rate. The string method will be illustrated via several examples.