Variational boundary conditions for molecular dynamics simulations of crystalline solids at finite temperature: Treatment of the thermal bath

This paper presents a systematic approach for finding efficient boundary conditions for molecular dynamics simulations of crystalline solids. These boundary conditions effectively eliminate phonon reflection at the boundary and at the same time allow the thermal energy from the bath to be introduced to the system. Our starting point is the Mori-Zwanzig formalism [R. Zwanzig, J. Chem. Phys. 32, 1173 (1960); in Systems Far from Equilibrium, edited by L. Garrido (Interscience, New York, 1980); H. Mori, Prog. Theor. Phys. 33, 423 (1965)] for eliminating the thermal bath, but we take the crucial next step that goes beyond this formalism in order to obtain memory kernels that decay faster. An equivalent variational formulation allows us to find the optimal approximate boundary conditions, after specifying the spatial-temporal domain of dependence for the positions of the boundary atoms. Application to a one-dimensional chain, a two-dimensional Lennard-Jones system, and a three-dimensional model of alpha-iron with embedded atom potential is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach.