A force field for water has been developed entirely from first principles, without any fitting to experimental data. It contains both pairwise and many-body interactions. This force field predicts the properties of the water dimer and of liquid water in excellent agreement with experiments, a previously elusive objective. Precise knowledge of the intermolecular interactions in water will facilitate a better understanding of this ubiquitous substance.

Expressions are derived within the relativistic regular approximation (ZORA) for the evaluation of the magnetic hyperfine interactions in paramagnetic molecules. For hydrogen-like atoms exact first order relations between the ZORA and Dirac formalism are given for the calculation of g- and A-tensors. Density functional calculations are performed on the neutral atoms Cu, Ag and Au, on some small test molecules NO2, HCO, and TiF3, and on some paramagnetic clusters consisting of 5 or 7 atoms of the group IB metals: Cu7, Cu2Ag5, CuAg6, Ag5, Ag7, and Au7. It is shown that the calculated ESR parameters of the heptamers are in good agreement with results of experiments, which originally were assigned to pentamers.

A method has been developed for the calculation of the g-tensor of Kramers doublet open shell molecules, which uses the spinor of the unpaired electron of the paramagnetic molecule, obtained from a density functional calculation. Spin–orbit coupling is taken into account variationally using the zeroth-order regular approximation (ZORA) to the Dirac equation. The problem of gauge dependence is solved by using gauge including atomic orbitals (GIAO’s). The method gives fair agreement with experimental values for the g values of some small test molecules NO2, HCO, and TiF3.

A new ab initio pair potential for water was generated by fitting 2510 interaction energies computed by the use of symmetry-adapted perturbation theory ͑SAPT͒. The new site-site functional form, named SAPT-5s, is simple enough to be applied in molecular simulations of condensed phases and at the same time reproduces the computed points with accuracy exceeding that of the elaborate SAPT-pp functional form used earlier ͓J. Chem. Phys. 107, 4207 ͑1997͔͒. SAPT-5s has been shown to quantitatively predict the water dimer spectra, see the following paper ͑paper II͒. It also gives the second virial coefficient in excellent agreement with experiment. Features of the water dimer potential energy surface have been analyzed using SAPT-5s. Average values of powers of the intermolecular separation-obtained from the ground-state rovibrational wave function computed in the SAPT-5s potential-have been combined with measured values to obtain a new empirical estimate of the equilibrium O-O separation equal to 5.50Ϯ0.01 bohr, significantly shorter than the previously accepted value. The residual errors in the SAPT-5s potential have been estimated by comparison to recent large-scale extrapolated ab initio calculations for water dimer. This estimatetogether with the dissociation energy D 0 computed from SAPT-5s-leads to a new prediction of the limit value of D 0 equal to 1165Ϯ54 cm Ϫ1 , close to but significantly more accurate than the best empirical value.

Anisotropy is a fundamental property of particle interactions. It occupies a central role in cold and ultra-cold molecular processes, where long-range forces have been found to significantly depend on orientation in ultra-cold polar molecule collisions 1,2 . Recent experiments have demonstrated the emergence of quantum phenomena such as scattering resonances in the cold collisions regime due to quantization of the intermolecular degrees of freedom 3-8 . Although these states have been shown to be sensitive to interaction details, the effect of anisotropy on quantum resonances has eluded experimental observation so far. Here, we directly measure the anisotropy in atom-molecule interactions via quantum resonances by changing the quantum state of the internal molecular rotor. We observe that a quantum scattering resonance at a collision energy of appears in the Penning ionization of molecular hydrogen with metastable helium only if the molecule is rotationally excited. We use state of the art ab initio and multichannel quantum molecular dynamics calculations to show that the anisotropy contributes to the effective interaction only for molecules in the first excited rotational state, whereas rotationally ground state interacts purely isotropically with metastable helium. Control over the quantum state of the internal molecular rotation allows us to switch the anisotropy on or off and thus disentangle the isotropic and anisotropic parts of the interaction. These quantum phenomena provide a challenging benchmark for even the most advanced theoretical descriptions, highlighting the advantage of using cold collisions to advance the microscopic understanding of particle interactions.