Energy landscapes, supergraphs, and "folding funnels" in spin systems

Piotr Garstecki, Trinh Xuan Hoang, Marek Cieplak

Published 1999-04-05, updated 1999-08-20Version 2

Dynamical connectivity graphs, which describe dynamical transition rates between local energy minima of a system, can be displayed against the background of a disconnectivity graph which represents the energy landscape of the system. The resulting supergraph describes both dynamics and statics of the system in a unified coarse-grained sense. We give examples of the supergraphs for several two dimensional spin and protein-related systems. We demonstrate that disordered ferromagnets have supergraphs akin to those of model proteins whereas spin glasses behave like random sequences of aminoacids which fold badly.