Thermodynamics of Lattice Heteropolymers

Abstract

We calculate thermodynamic quantities of HP lattice proteins by means of a multicanonical chain growth algorithm that connects the new variants of the Pruned-Enriched Rosenbluth Method (nPERM) and flat histogram sampling of the entire energy space. Since our method directly simulates the density of states, we obtain results for thermodynamic quantities of the system for all temperatures. In particular, this algorithm enables us to accurately simulate the usually difficult accessible low-temperature region. Therefore, it becomes possible to perform detailed analyses of the low-temperature transition between ground states and compact globules.