A bug in velocity command

Dear LAMMPS developers,

Hi, I ran into a bug in dist uniform of velocity command. When I ran a simulation with heterogeneous system such as water with membrane, water and membrane had non-zero momentum after velocity create all.
I have looked into the file ‘velocity.cpp’ and found that it makes net momentum of the group specified in velocity command to zero, but groups of specific element still have non-zero momentum.

vx = random->uniform()
factor = 1.0/sqrt(mass[type[m]]);
v[m][0] = vx * factor;
if (momentum_flag) zero_momentum();
rescale(t, t_desired);

Here’s a part of the code. It generates uniform distribution and scale it by mass factor, zero the total momentum and rescale it by temperature factor. But random->uniform() generates uniform distribution from 0 to 1. Therefore, for example, after multiplying mass factor, the group of hydrogens will have vx of 0 to 10 and the group of silicons will have vx of 0 to 1. Zeroing total momentum would bring vx of hydrogens to something like -1 to 9, silicons to -1 to 0.
I think the initial distribution generated should be symmetric like -1 to 1, or zeroing momentum should be performed before multiplying factors.

Regards,

Dongsun

This is a good point we hadn’t considered. I just
changed the initial uniform distribution to be from

-0.5 to 0.5 rather than 0 to 1, to avoid a mass-dependent
asymmetry in initial momentum.

The Gaussian distribution is unaffected, i.e. it should already
be symmetric.

Thanks,
Steve