Coarse-graining away electronic structure: a rigorous route to accurate condensed phase interaction potentials

Abstract

The molecular simulation of condensed phase systems with electronic structure methods can be prohibitively expensive if the length and time scales necessary to observe the desired chemical phenomena are too large. One solution is to map the results of a representative electronic structure simulation onto a computationally more efficient model that reproduces the original calculation, while allowing for statistical sampling relevant to the required length and time scales. The statistical mechanical multiscale coarse-graining procedure is one methodology in which a model can be developed by integrating over the subset of fast degrees of freedom to construct a reduced representation of the original system that reproduces thermodynamic, and in some instances dynamic, properties. The coarse-graining away of electronic structure is one application of this general method, wherein the electronic degrees of freedom are integrated out and the full dimensionality of the system is mapped to that of only the nuclei. The forces on the nuclei in this reduced representation are obtained from a variational force-matching procedure applied to the Hellman–Feynman forces of the original full electron + nuclear system. This work discusses the coarse-graining procedure and its application to ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of the aqueous hydroxide ion.