Dipole moment of a small water cluster. The effect of size, temperature, and electric field

Abstract

A molecular dynamics simulation of neutral clusters (H2O)n ≤ 21 has been performed in the framework of the flexible polarized model. The formation and evolution of the dipole moment of the cluster have been investigated with a change in the size and temperature of the cluster and an external electric field. It has been shown that at low electric fields corresponding to the experiments on the deflection of clusters in the transverse inhomogeneous electrostatic field (Moro et al., 2006), the induced polarization of the cluster is determined by the orientational polarizability of the “rigid” cluster, rather than by the intracluster reorientation of the molecules. The calculated dependence of the effective polarizability of the cluster in the low field on n qualitatively reproduces the experimental results, but the calculated polarizability is numerically much higher than the experimental value by, e.g., a factor of 4 for n ≈ 20.