A new classical empirical potential is proposed for water. The model uses a polarizable atomic multipole description of electrostatic interactions. Multipoles through the quadrupole are assigned to each atomic center based on a distributed multipole analysis (DMA) derived from large basis set molecular orbital calculations on the water monomer. Polarization is treated via self-consistent induced atomic dipoles. A modified version of Thole's interaction model is used to damp induction at short range. Repulsion-dispersion (vdW) effects are computed from a buffered 14-7 potential. In a departure from most current water potentials, we find that significant vdW parameters are necessary on hydrogen as well as oxygen. The new potential is fully flexible and has been tested versus a variety of experimental data and quantum calculations for small clusters, liquid water, and ice. Overall, excellent agreement with experimental and high level ab initio results is obtained for numerous properties, including cluster structures and energetics and bulk thermodynamic and structural measures. The parametrization scheme described here is easily extended to other molecular systems, and the resulting water potential should provide a useful explicit solvent model for organic solutes and biopolymer modeling.
IntroductionEmpirical potential energy functions derived from classical molecular mechanics are central to computational modeling at the atomic level. Molecular mechanics has long enjoyed great success in application to many classes of isolated, gas-phase organic compounds. 1 Beginning with the pioneering work of Bernal and Fowler, 2 water has probably been the target of more potential energy models than any other substance. An interesting overview and historical perspective on the development of water models was recently presented by Finney. 3 Simple nonpolarizable pairwise-additive models that describe the average structure and energetics of liquid water have been in wide use for many years (e.g., TIP3P 4 and SPC 5 ). The recently developed TIP5P potential exhibits excellent agreement with the experimental internal energy, density, and O‚‚‚O radial distribution at room temperature. 6 These models typically use fixed atom-based partial charges to model electrostatics and include polarization response to the environment only in an averaged, mean-field sense. As a result, nonpolarizable potentials that provide excellent descriptions of the homogeneous bulk phase are poor models for gas phase clusters and for nonpolar solutes in polar solvents. For example, the gas phase binding energy of the water dimer is overestimated by more than 30% in the TIP5P model. In application to large biomolecular systems, there is concern that such models cannot correctly account for situations where the same nonpolarizable moiety is exposed to different electrostatic environments, either within a single large static structure or during a course of simulation. In addition, there is an inherent inconsistency in most nonpolarizable models related to thei...