Eur. Phys. J. B 64, 257-261 (2008)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2008-00301-0

The Rubik's cube problem revisited: a statistical thermodynamic approach

Department of Physics and Center for Complex Systems, National Central University, Jhongli 32001, Taiwan

Corresponding author: ^a chilun@ncu.edu.tw

Received: 22 April 2008
Revised: 17 June 2008
Published online: 23 July 2008

Abstract

Inspired by the protein folding problem, we propose a Rubik's cube model and study its thermodynamic and kinetic behavior. We find that the energy landscape contains a tiny funnel-like region, as the dynamics towards the native state is mostly diffusive. In particular, from Monte Carlo simulations we observe exponential kinetics in the first-passage-time distribution towards the native state at all temperatures considered, while the complexity of the energy landscape is exhibited through a stretched-exponential relaxation of the energy autocorrelation function. The rollover feature in the mean first passage time, as observed in many protein-folding dynamics studies, is captured again in our model and discussed under the statistical energy landscape approach.