A fast and rigorous numerical tool to measure length-scale artifacts in molecular simulations

Abstract

The two-sided Bogoliubov inequality for classical and quantum many-body systems is a theorem that provides rigorous bounds on the free-energy cost of partitioning a given system into two or more independent subsystems. This theorem motivates the definition of a quality factor which directly quantifies the degree of statistical-mechanical consistency achieved by a given simulation box size. A major technical merit of the theorem is that, for systems with two-body interactions and a known radial distribution function, the quality factor can be computed by evaluating just two six-dimensional integrals. In this work, we present a numerical algorithm for computing the quality factor and demonstrate its consistency with respect to results in the literature obtained from simulations performed at different box sizes.