A smooth particle mesh Ewald method

Abstract

The previously developed particle mesh Ewald method is reformulated in terms of efficient B-spline interpolation of the structure factors. This reformulation allows a natural extension of the method to potentials of the form 1/rp with p≥1. Furthermore, efficient calculation of the virial tensor follows. Use of B-splines in place of Lagrange interpolation leads to analytic gradients as well as a significant improvement in the accuracy. We demonstrate that arbitrary accuracy can be achieved, independent of system size N, at a cost that scales as N log(N). For biomolecular systems with many thousands of atoms this method permits the use of Ewald summation at a computational cost comparable to that of a simple truncation method of 10 Å or less.