Metadynamics is a computer simulation method in computational physics, chemistry and biology. It is used to estimate the free energy and other state functions of a system, where ergodicity is hindered by the form of the system's energy landscape.

How does metadynamics work?

Metadynamics involves enhanced sampling over collective variables using a biased potential to force the system to leave local minima and thus sample low-probability states (Laio and Parrinello, 2002). Metadynamics is an adaptive method, automatically biasing configurations away from those most visited.

What is well tempered metadynamics?

Well-Tempered Metadynamics: A Smoothly Converging and Tunable Free-Energy Method. ... The formalism provides a unified description which has metadynamics and canonical sampling as limiting cases. Convergence and errors can be rigorously and easily controlled.