Local elevation

This article may be too technical for most readers to understand. Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts, without removing the technical details. (February 2011) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Local elevation is a technique used in computational chemistry or physics, mainly in the field of molecular simulation (including molecular dynamics (MD) and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations). It was developed in 1994 by Huber, Torda and van Gunsteren ^[1] to enhance the searching of conformational space in molecular dynamics simulations and is available in the GROMOS software for molecular dynamics simulation (since GROMOS96). The method was, together with the conformational flooding method, ^[2] the first to introduce memory dependence into molecular simulations. Many recent methods build on the principles of the local elevation technique, including the Engkvist-Karlström, ^[3] adaptive biasing force, ^[4] Wang–Landau, metadynamics, adaptively biased molecular dynamics, ^[5] adaptive reaction coordinate forces, ^[6] and local elevation umbrella sampling ^[7] methods. The basic principle of the method is to add a memory-dependent potential energy term in the simulation so as to prevent the simulation to revisit already sampled configurations, which leads to the increased probability of discovering new configurations. The method can be seen as a continuous variant of the Tabu search method.