Talk:Energy landscape

Comment
An energy landscape is a particular kind of hypersurface with a special interpretation. I don't think this article should just be merged with hypersurfaces. For example, the local minima of an energy landscape corresponds to metastable low temperature states of a thermodynamic system. Ie, it is the graph of an function representing energy over the physical states or parameters of the system. Various computational methods like simulated annealling are designed to find local minima and are well described as analogies of physical processes. Thus, they are adequately described as operating on an energy landscape. -- KarlHallowell 18:57, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Comment2
I may be wrong, but doesn't the energy landscape map the other way? from energy to allowable conformation? The idea is to get a picture of how the hamiltonian describes the configuration. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.133.94.160 (talk) 05:52, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
 * No, it gives the energy for a given configuration. Just as a topographic map would give the altitude for any given x,y coordinates. --99of9 (talk) 06:26, 8 April 2011 (UTC)


 * I have the David Wales book and it doesn't go into this. Is there a reference for the more rigorous definition?

Comment3

 * I would say that the term is mainly colloquial and not a rigorous one. The term has become popular lately in the "New View" for protein folding. It tries to give an intuitive picture of a multidimensional potential, full of features as hills and valleys, roughness etc. It is mainly used in the fields of chemistry and biology, and by extension in condensed soft matter. Other formally inaccurate figures of speech related are the "tiled" landscape, when an external force adds a linear potential (but does NOT rotate the previous one!!!). This article need much work. Godot (talk) 16:05, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Further guidance
--Libb Thims (talk) 01:28, 10 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Energy landscape

Mathematical definition
In my revision, I tried to make the mathematical definition more clear. The previous version was


 * redundant (why define the energy landscape as a pair $$(X,f)$$ if $$X$$ is already part of the definition of $$f : X \to \mathbb{R}$$?) and
 * incorrect (the image of a continuous function $$f : X \to \mathbb{R}$$ is an interval in $$\mathbb{R}$$, not a hypersurface in $$\mathbb{R}^n$$).

Hypergraph (talk) 20:18, 28 August 2012 (UTC)