  The kinetics of collective rearrangements in solution, such as protein
folding and nanocrystal phase transitions, often involve free energy barriers
that are both long and rough. Applying methods of transition path sampling to
harvest simulated trajectories that exemplify such processes is typically made
difficult by a very low acceptance rate for newly generated trajectories. We
address this problem by introducing a new generation algorithm based on the
linear short-time behavior of small disturbances in phase space. Using this
``precision shooting'' technique, arbitrarily small disturbances can be
propagated in time, and any desired acceptance ratio of shooting moves can be
obtained. We demonstrate the method for a simple but computationally
problematic isomerization process in a dense liquid of soft spheres. We also
discuss its applicability to barrier crossing events involving metastable
intermediate states.

Statistical Mechanics