"The numerical accuracy of truncated Ewald sums for periodic systems with long-range Coulomb interactions"
arXiv:chem-ph/9502004 · doi:10.1016/0009-2614(95)00117-M
Abstract
Ewald summation is widely used to calculate electrostatic interactions in computer simulations of condensed-matter systems. We present an analysis of the errors arising from truncating the infinite real- and Fourier-space lattice sums in the Ewald formulation. We derive an optimal choice for the Fourier-space cutoff given a screening parameter $η$. We find that the number of vectors in Fourier space required to achieve a given accuracy scales with $η^3$. The proposed method can be used to determine computationally efficient parameters for Ewald sums, to assess the quality of Ewald-sum implementations, and to compare different implementations.
6 pages, 3 figures (Encapsulated PostScript), LaTex