Ab Initio Free Energy Perturbation Research Articles

Static dielectric constants and molecular dipole distributions of liquid water and ice-Ih investigated by the PAW-PBE exchange-correlation functional

The static dielectric constants, ε(s), of ice-Ih and liquid water were calculated using density functional theory with the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) exchange-correlation functional and the projector-augmented-wave (PAW) approach. Proton disordered ice configurations and uncorrelated liquid configurations were sampled with the electrostatic switching method using force fields specially designed to facilitate the ab initio free energy perturbation calculations. Our results indicate that PAW-PBE underestimates the ε(s) of both ice-Ih and liquid water but predicts the ratio of ice and water ε(s) in good agreement with experimental measurements. PAW-PBE gives average water dipole moments of 2.50 D in ice-Ih and 2.48 D in the liquid. Our results show that the fixed-charge water models developed by adaptive force matching can reproduce the PAW-PBE dipole moments with an error of approximately 5%. The ice and liquid models created in this work have polarizabilities of 1.32 Å(3) and 1.30 Å(3), respectively, along the HOH bisector direction.

Achieving fast convergence of ab initio free energy perturbation calculations with the adaptive force-matching method

This paper studies the possibility of improving the convergence of ab initio free energy perturbation (FEP) calculations by developing customized force fields with the adaptive force-matching (AFM) method. The ab initio FEP method relies on a molecular mechanics (MM) potential to sample configuration space. If the Boltzmann weight of the MM sampling is close to that of the ab initio method, the efficiency of ab initio FEP will be optimal. The difference in the Boltzmann weights can be quantified by the relative energy difference distribution (REDD). The force field developed through AFM significantly improves the REDD when compared with standard MM models, thus improving the convergence of the ab initio FEP calculation. The static dielectric constant es of ice-Ih was studied with PW-91 through ab initio FEP. With a customized force field developed through AFM, we were able to converge es to 80 ± 4 with 3,600 configurations. A similar ab initio FEP calculation with the TIP4P model would require 220 times more configurations to achieve the same accuracy. Our study indicates that the PW-91 functional underestimates ice-Ih es by about 20%.