Berlin 2012 – scientific programme

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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik

BP 18: Posters: Statistical Physics in Biological Systems

BP 18.16: Poster

Wednesday, March 28, 2012, 17:30–19:30, Poster A

Influence of dielectric background on biophysical simulations — •Florian Fahrenberger and Christian Holm — Institut für Computerphysik, Universität Stuttgart, Deutschland

In today's computer simulations, especially in but not limited to biophysics, electrostatic interactions play a crucial role in the behaviour of experimentally relevant systems. They also take up a major amount of the computation time and are very complicated to parallelize.

We present an electrostatics algorithm that is intrinsically local and therefore straight forward to parallelize. One of the main advantages of the algorithm's locality is that one can apply spatially varying dielectric properties to the simulation background. For many coarse-grained simulations of biophysical systems this is of high interest, since the dielectric permittivity is directly dependent on the salt concentration in water, which can vary significantly in inhomogeneously distributed systems.

We present the theory behind this algorithm and show the influence of variations in salt concentration in some typical simulation setups.