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### compute pe/atom command

Syntax:

    compute ID group-ID pe/atom keyword ...

- ID, group-ID are documented in compute command
- pe/atom = style name of this compute command
- zero or more keywords may be appended
- keyword = pair or bond or angle or dihedral or improper

Examples:

    compute 1 all pe/atom
    compute 1 all pe/atom pair
    compute 1 all pe/atom pair bond

Description:

Define a computation that computes the per-atom potential energy for each atom in a group. See the compute pe command if you want the potential energy of the entire system.

The per-atom energy is calculated by the various pair, bond, etc potentials defined for the simulation. If no extra keywords are listed, then the potential energy is the sum of pair, bond, angle, dihedral, and improper energy. If any extra keywords are listed, then only those components are summed to compute the potential energy.

Note that the energy of each atom is due to its interaction with all other atoms in the simulation, not just with other atoms in the group.

For an energy contribution produced by a small set of atoms (e.g. 4 atoms in a dihedral or 3 atoms in a Tersoff 3-body interaction), that energy is assigned in equal portions to each atom in the set. E.g. 1/4 of the dihedral energy to each of the 4 atoms.

The dihedral_style charmm style calculates pairwise interactions between 1-4 atoms. The energy contribution of these terms is included in the pair energy, not the dihedral energy.

As an example of per-atom potential energy compared to total potential energy, these lines in an input script should yield the same result in the last 2 columns of thermo output:

    compute		peratom all pe/atom
    compute		pe all reduce sum c_peratom
    thermo_style	custom step temp etotal press pe c_pe

IMPORTANT NOTE: The per-atom energy does NOT include contributions due to long-range Coulombic interactions (via the kspace_style command). It's not clear this contribution can easily be computed.

Output info:

This compute calculates a per-atom vector, which can be accessed by any command that uses per-atom values from a compute as input. See this section for an overview of LAMMPS output options.

The per-atom vector values will be in energy units.

Restrictions:

Related commands:

compute pe, compute stress/atom

Default: none