A Multiscale Approach to Determination of Thermal Properties and Changes   in Free Energy: Application to Reconstruction of Dislocations in Silicon
  We introduce an approach to exploit the existence of multiple levels of description of a physical system to radically accelerate the determination of thermodynamic quantities. We first give a proof of principle of the method using two empirical interatomic potential functions. We then apply the technique to feed information from an interatomic potential into otherwise inaccessible quantum mechanical tight-binding calculations of the reconstruction of partial dislocations in silicon at finite temperature. With this approach, comprehensive ab initio studies at finite temperature will now be possible. 
T.D. Engeness and T.A. Arias