Scalable cell filter nudged elastic band (CFNEB) for large-scale transition-path calculations

Abstract

The nudged elastic band (NEB) method is one of the most widely used techniques for determining minimum-energy reaction pathways and activation barriers between known initial and final states. However, conventional implementations face steep computational scaling with system size, which makes nucleation-type transitions in realistically large supercells practically inaccessible. In this work, we develop a scalable cell-filter nudged elastic band (CFNEB) framework that enables efficient transition-path calculations in systems containing up to $10^5$ atoms. The method combines a deformation-based cell filtering scheme, which treats lattice vectors as generalized coordinates while removing spurious rotational degrees of freedom, with an adaptive image insertion and deletion strategy that dynamically refines the reaction path. We implement CFNEB both within the ASE environment and in a fully GPU-accelerated version using the Graphics Processing Units Molecular Dynamics (GPUMD) engine, achieving throughput on the order of $10^6$ atom$\cdot$steps per second on consumer GPUs. We demonstrate the method on two representative systems: the layer-by-layer $\beta$-$\lambda$ transition in $Ti_3O_5$ and the nucleation-driven graphite-to-diamond transformation. These examples illustrate that CFNEB not only reproduces known concerted pathways but also captures spontaneous symmetry breaking toward nucleated mechanisms when the simulation cell is sufficiently large. Our results establish CFNEB as a practical route to exploring realistic transition mechanisms in large-scale solid-state systems.