Rugged Free Energy Landscapes: Common Computational Approaches to Spin Glasses, Structural Glasses and Biological Macromolecules

This collection of lectures and tutorial reviews by renowned experts focusses on the common computational approaches in use to unravel the static and dynamical behaviour of complex physical systems at the interface of physics, chemistry and biology. Paradigmatic examples of condensed matter physics are spin and structural glasses and protein folding, as well as their aggregation and adsorption to hard and soft surfaces, in physico-chemical biology.

Among the most prominent joint key features of the systems considered in this volume are rugged free-energy landscapes. These generate metastability and are often responsible for very slow dynamics allowing for the system to be trapped in one of the many available local minima.

The challenge set forth by the authors of this volume is to provide a common basis and technical language for the (computational) technology transfer between the fields and systems considered.