Symplectic integrator for molecular dynamics of a protein in water

The symplectic integrator is an algorithm for solving equations of motion, preserving the volume in phase space and ensuring a stable simulation. We carried out molecular dynamics simulations of liquid water and a protein in water using several variations of symplectic integrators. It was found that a fourth-order symplectic integrator of Calvo and Sanz-Serna generated a trajectory of much higher accuracy than the conventional Verlet and Gear methods with the same requirements for CPU time.