scholarly journals Determining Partial Atomic Charges for Liquid Water: Assessing Electronic Structure and Charge Models

Author(s):  
Bowen Han ◽  
Christine M. Isborn ◽  
Liang Shi
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bowen Han ◽  
Christine Isborn ◽  
Liang Shi

Partial atomic charges provide an intuitive and efficient way to describe the charge distribution and the resulting intermolecular electrostatic interactions in liquid water. Many charge models exist and it is unclear which model provides the best assignment of partial atomic charges in response to the local molecular environment. In this work, we systematically scrutinize various electronic structure methods and charge models (Mulliken, Natural Population Analysis, CHelpG, RESP, Hirshfeld, Iterative Hirshfeld, and Bader) by evaluating their performance in predicting the dipole moments of isolated water, water clusters, and liquid water as well as charge transfer in the water dimer and liquid water. Although none of the seven charge models is capable of fully capturing the dipole moment increase from isolated water (1.85 D) to liquid water (about 2.9 D), the Iterative Hirshfeld method performs best for liquid water, reproducing its experimental average molecular dipole moment, yielding a reasonable amount of intermolecular charge transfer, and showing modest sensitivity to the local water environment. The performance of the charge model is dependent on the choice of the density functional and the quantum treatment of the environment. The computed molecular dipole moment of water generally increases with the percentage of the exact Hartree-Fock exchange in the functional, whereas the amount of charge transfer between molecules decreases. For liquid water, including two full solvation shells of surrounding water molecules (within about 5.5 A of the central water) in the quantum-chemical calculation converges the charges of the central water molecule. Our final pragmatic quantum-chemical charge assigning protocol for liquid water is the Iterative Hirshfeld method with M06-HF/aug-cc-pVDZ and a quantum region cutoff radius of 5.5 A.<br>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bowen Han ◽  
Christine Isborn ◽  
Liang Shi

Partial atomic charges provide an intuitive and efficient way to describe the charge distribution and the resulting intermolecular electrostatic interactions in liquid water. Many charge models exist and it is unclear which model provides the best assignment of partial atomic charges in response to the local molecular environment. In this work, we systematically scrutinize various electronic structure methods and charge models (Mulliken, Natural Population Analysis, CHelpG, RESP, Hirshfeld, Iterative Hirshfeld, and Bader) by evaluating their performance in predicting the dipole moments of isolated water, water clusters, and liquid water as well as charge transfer in the water dimer and liquid water. Although none of the seven charge models is capable of fully capturing the dipole moment increase from isolated water (1.85 D) to liquid water (about 2.9 D), the Iterative Hirshfeld method performs best for liquid water, reproducing its experimental average molecular dipole moment, yielding a reasonable amount of intermolecular charge transfer, and showing modest sensitivity to the local water environment. The performance of the charge model is dependent on the choice of the density functional and the quantum treatment of the environment. The computed molecular dipole moment of water generally increases with the percentage of the exact Hartree-Fock exchange in the functional, whereas the amount of charge transfer between molecules decreases. For liquid water, including two full solvation shells of surrounding water molecules (within about 5.5 A of the central water) in the quantum-chemical calculation converges the charges of the central water molecule. Our final pragmatic quantum-chemical charge assigning protocol for liquid water is the Iterative Hirshfeld method with M06-HF/aug-cc-pVDZ and a quantum region cutoff radius of 5.5 A.<br>


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Zhou ◽  
Michael Schauperl ◽  
Paul Nerenberg

<p>The accuracy of classical molecular mechanics (MM) force fields used for condensed phase molecular simulations depends strongly on the accuracy of modeling nonbonded interactions between atoms, such as electrostatic interactions. Some popular fixed-charge MM force fields use partial atomic charges derived from gas phase electronic structure calculations using the Hartree-Fock method with the relatively small 6-31G* basis set (HF/6-31G*). It is generally believed that HF/6-31G* generates fortuitously overpolarized electron distributions, as would be expected in the higher dielectric environment of the condensed phase. Using a benchmark set of 47 molecules we show that HF/6-31G* overpolarizes molecules by just under 10% on average with respect to experimental gas phase dipole moments. The overpolarization of this method/basis set combination varies significantly though and, in some cases, even leads to molecular dipole moments that are lower than experimental gas phase measurements. We further demonstrate that using computationally inexpensive density functional theory (DFT) methods, together with appropriate augmented basis sets and a continuum solvent model, can yield molecular dipole moments that are both more strongly and more uniformly overpolarized. These data suggest that these methods – or ones similar to them – should be adopted for the derivation of accurate partial atomic charges for next-generation MM force fields.<br></p>


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Zhou ◽  
Michael Schauperl ◽  
Paul Nerenberg

<p>The accuracy of classical molecular mechanics (MM) force fields used for condensed phase molecular simulations depends strongly on the accuracy of modeling nonbonded interactions between atoms, such as electrostatic interactions. Some popular fixed-charge MM force fields use partial atomic charges derived from gas phase electronic structure calculations using the Hartree-Fock method with the relatively small 6-31G* basis set (HF/6-31G*). It is generally believed that HF/6-31G* generates fortuitously overpolarized electron distributions, as would be expected in the higher dielectric environment of the condensed phase. Using a benchmark set of 47 molecules we show that HF/6-31G* overpolarizes molecules by just under 10% on average with respect to experimental gas phase dipole moments. The overpolarization of this method/basis set combination varies significantly though and, in some cases, even leads to molecular dipole moments that are lower than experimental gas phase measurements. We further demonstrate that using computationally inexpensive density functional theory (DFT) methods, together with appropriate augmented basis sets and a continuum solvent model, can yield molecular dipole moments that are both more strongly and more uniformly overpolarized. These data suggest that these methods – or ones similar to them – should be adopted for the derivation of accurate partial atomic charges for next-generation MM force fields.<br></p>


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Zhou ◽  
Michael Schauperl ◽  
Paul Nerenberg

<div><div><div><p>The accuracy of classical molecular mechanics (MM) force fields used for condensed phase molecular simulations depends strongly on the accuracy of modeling nonbonded interactions between atoms, such as electrostatic interactions. Some popular fixed-charge MM force fields use partial atomic charges derived from gas phase electronic structure calculations using the Hartree-Fock method with the relatively small 6-31G* basis set (HF/6-31G*). It is generally believed that HF/6-31G* generates fortuitously overpolarized electron distributions, as would be expected in the higher dielectric environment of the condensed phase. Using a benchmark set of 47 molecules, we show that HF/6-31G* does not uniformly overpolarize molecules and in some cases even leads to molecular dipole moments that are lower than experimental gas phase measurements. We further demonstrate that using computationally inexpensive density functional theory (DFT) methods, together with appropriate augmented basis sets and a continuum solvent model, can yield molecular dipole moments that are both more strongly and more uniformly overpolarized. These data suggest that these methods – or ones similar to them – should be adopted for the derivation of accurate partial atomic charges for next-generation MM force fields.</p></div></div></div>


2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (16) ◽  
pp. 3759-3764 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhong Yin ◽  
Ludger Inhester ◽  
Sreevidya Thekku Veedu ◽  
Wilson Quevedo ◽  
Annette Pietzsch ◽  
...  

2019 ◽  
Vol 277 ◽  
pp. 184-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jarod J. Wolffis ◽  
Danny E.P. Vanpoucke ◽  
Amit Sharma ◽  
Keith V. Lawler ◽  
Paul M. Forster

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 848-865 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marvin N. Pohl ◽  
Eva Muchová ◽  
Robert Seidel ◽  
Hebatallah Ali ◽  
Štěpán Sršeň ◽  
...  

Ions have a profound effect on the geometrical structure of liquid water and an aqueous environment is known to change the electronic structure of ions.


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