Electrostatic Energy Calculations for Molecular Dynamics

The evaluation of Coulomb forces is a difficult task. The summations that are involved converge only conditionally and care has to be taken in selecting the appropriate procedure to define the limits. The Ewald method is a standard method for obtaining Coulomb forces, but this method is rather slow, since it depends on the square of the number of atoms in a unit cell. In this paper we have adapted the plane-wise summation method for the evaluation of Coulomb forces. The use of this method allows for larger computational cells in molecular dynamics calculations.