Open Access

Christof Schütte, Folkmar A. Bornemann

• {\footnotesize In classical Molecular Dynamics a molecular system is modelled by classical Hamiltonian equations of motion. The potential part of the corresponding energy function of the system includes contributions of several types of atomic interaction. Among these, some interactions represent the bond structure of the molecule. Particularly these interactions lead to extremely stiff potentials which force the solution of the equations of motion to oscillate on a very small time scale. There is a strong need for eliminating the smallest time scales because they are a severe restriction for numerical long-term simulations of macromolecules. This leads to the idea of just freezing the high frequency degrees of freedom (bond stretching and bond angles) via increasing the stiffness of the strong part of the potential to infinity. However, the naive way of doing this via holonomic constraints mistakenly ignores the energy contribution of the fast oscillations. The paper presents a mathematically rigorous discussion of the limit situation of infinite stiffness. It is demonstrated that the average of the limit solution indeed obeys a constrained Hamiltonian system but with a {\em corrected soft potential}. An explicit formula for the additive potential correction is given via a careful inspection of the limit energy of the fast oscillations. Unfortunately, the theory is valid only as long as the system does not run into certain resonances of the fast motions. Behind those resonances, there is no unique limit solution but a kind of choatic scenario for which the notion ``Takens chaos'' was coined. For demonstrating the relevance of this observation for MD, the theory is applied to a realistic, but still simple system: a single butan molecule. The appearance of ``Takens chaos'' in smoothed MD is illustrated and the consequences are discussed.}