  Popular methods for identifying transition paths between energy minima, such
as the nudged elastic band and string methods, typically do not incorporate
potential energy curvature information, leading to slow relaxation to the
minimum energy path for typical potential energy surfaces encountered in
molecular simulation. We propose a preconditioning scheme which, combined with
a new adaptive timestep selection algorithm, substantially reduces the
computational cost of transition path finding algorithms. We demonstrate the
improved performance of our approach in a range of examples including vacancy
and dislocation migration modelled with both interatomic potentials and density
functional theory.
