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Coarse-grained conformational surface hopping: Methodology and transferability

Coarse-grained (CG) conformational surface hopping (SH) adapts the concept of multisurface dynamics, initially developed to describe electronic transitions in chemical reactions, to accurately describe classical molecular dynamics at a reduced level. The SH scheme couples distinct conformational basins (states), each described by its own force field (surface), resulting in a significant improvement of the approximation to the many-body potential of mean force [Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 256002 (2018)]. The present study first describes CG SH in more detail, through both a toy model and a three-bead model of hexane. We further extend the methodology to non-bonded interactions and report its impact on liquid properties. Finally, we investigate the transferability of the surfaces to distinct systems and thermodynamic state points, through a simple tuning of the state probabilities. In particular, applications to variations in temperature and chemical composition show good agreement with reference atomistic calculations, introducing a promising "weak-transferability regime," where CG force fields can be shared across thermodynamic and chemical neighborhoods.