Figure 4.

Normalized distribution of ion binding energies using approach A2 (see Methods) and its multistate decomposition. Following Hummer et al. (13) the substate distributions are given by log [p(n)P(ɛ|n)] (Eq. 5). (Left panel, □) Simulation results for K⁺. (Right panel, ○) Simulation results for Na⁺. The unbroken lines are the multistate fits. The skew normal fits to the individual states are labeled by the state index n. (Dashed curve) Thermodynamically dominant state. (Dotted curve) Least dominant state. For clarity, the raw substate distributions are not shown.