Institute for Advanced Simulation Monte Carlo and Kinetic Monte Carlo Methods – A Tutorial Peter Kratzer published in Multiscale Simulation Methods in Molecular Sciences, J. Grotendorst, N. Attig, S. Bl¨ugel, D. Marx (Eds.), Institute for Advanced Simulation, Forschungszentrum J¨ulich, NIC Series, Vol. 42, ISBN 978-3-9810843-8-2, pp. 51-76, 2009. c 2009 by John von Neumann Institute for Computing Permission to make digital or hard copies of portions of this work for personal or classroom use is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise requires prior specific permission by the publisher mentioned above. http://www.fz-juelich.de/nic-series/volume42 Monte Carlo and Kinetic Monte Carlo Methods – A Tutorial Peter Kratzer Fachbereich Physik and Center for Nanointegration (CeNIDE) Universit¨at Duisburg-Essen, Lotharstr. 1, 47048 Duisburg, Germany E-mail:
[email protected] 1 Introduction In Computational Materials Science we have learned a lot from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations that allows us to follow the dynamics of molecular processes in great detail. In particular, the combination of MD simulations with density functional theory (DFT) calculations of the electronic structure, as pioneered more than thirty years ago by the work of R. Car and M. Parrinello1, has brought us a great step further: Since DFT enables us to describe a wide class of chemical bonds with good accuracy, it has become possible to model the microscopic dynamics behind many technological important processes in materials processing or chemistry.