Abstract

Study of rare events such as nucleation or arrest in non-equilibrium physics is ever more fashionable, but existing rare event methods intended to enhance sampling (such as umbrella sampling and FFS ) are not usually practical for general nonequilibrium conditions (away from both stationary and metastable states). A novel method for calculating the time-series of the probability of a rare event is presented which is designed for these conditions. The method is validated for the cases of the Glauber-Ising model under time-varying shear flow, the Kawasaki-Ising model after a quench into the region between nucleation dominated and spinodal decomposition dominated phase change dynamics, and also for the parallel-open asymmetric exclusion process. The method requires a subdivision of the phase space of the system: it is benchmarked and found to scale well for increasingly fine subdivisions, meaning that it can be applied without detailed foreknowledge of the physically important reaction pathways.