L. Perera

The previously developed particle mesh Ewald method is reformulated in terms of efficient B-spline interpolation of the structure factors. This reformulation allows a natural extension of the method to potentials of the form 1/rp with p≥1. Furthermore, efficient calculation of the virial tensor follows. Use of B-splines in place of Lagrange interpolation leads to analytic gradients as well as a significant improvement in the accuracy. We demonstrate that arbitrary accuracy can be achieved, independent of system size N, at a cost that scales as N log(N). For biomolecular systems with many thousands of atoms this method permits the use of Ewald summation at a computational cost comparable to that of a simple truncation method of 10 Å or less.

The High Resolution Fly's Eye (HiRes) experiment has observed the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin suppression (called the GZK cutoff) with a statistical significance of five standard deviations. HiRes' measurement of the flux of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays shows a sharp suppression at an energy of 6 x 10(19) eV, consistent with the expected cutoff energy. We observe the ankle of the cosmic-ray energy spectrum as well, at an energy of 4 x 10(18) eV. We describe the experiment, data collection, and analysis and estimate the systematic uncertainties. The results are presented and the calculation of the statistical significance of our observation is described.

An all-atom 5 nanosecond molecular dynamics simulation of a water-solvated micelle containing 60 sodium dodecyl sulfate monomers was performed. Structural properties such as the radius of gyration, eccentricity, micellar size, accessible surface area, dihedral angle distribution, carbon atom distribution, and the orientation of the monomers toward the micelle center of mass were evaluated. The results indicate a stable micellar system over the duration of the simulation. Evaluation of the structure and motion of the sodium counterions show (1) a long equilibration time (1 nanosecond) is required to achieve a stable distribution of counterions and (2) approximately 25% of the sodium ions are located in the first shell and 50% are located in the first two shells of the micelle during the course of the simulation. The structure of the micelle oxygen−sodium ion radial distribution function reveals two distinct peaks which divide the counterions into those close to the micelle (first shell) those far from the micelle (bulk) and those between (second shell). Finally, values of the diffusion coefficient for sodium ions followed a decreasing trend for ions in the bulk of the micellar system (D = 1.9 × 10 -5 cm2/s), ions in the second shell of the micelle (D = 1.4 × 10 -5 cm2/s), and those in the first shell of the micelle (D = 1.0 × 10 -5 cm2/s).

Many-body effects were examined in a series of molecular dynamics computer simulations on the ionic aqueous clusters Na+(H2O)n (n=4,5,6,14) and Cl−(H2O)n (n=4,5,6,7,8,14). Two potential models were used in the simulations. In one model (TIP4P) the potential was pairwise additive, while in the second model (SPCE/POL) the many body effects were explicitly included through a self-consistent polarization routine. The two models produce equilibrium structures which are significantly different in energy and geometry. The SPCE/POL model consistently predicts energetically more stable products. In addition, for the anion cluster systems the SPCE/POL model places the Cl− on the surface of the water cluster.