Long-range Part Research Articles

Range Separation of the Interaction Potential in Intermolecular and Intramolecular Symmetry-Adapted Perturbation Theory.

Symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT) is a popular and versatile tool to compute and decompose noncovalent interaction energies between molecules. The intramolecular SAPT (ISAPT) variant provides a similar energy decomposition between two nonbonded fragments of the same molecule, covalently connected by a third fragment. In this work, we explore an alternative approach where the noncovalent interaction is singled out by a range separation of the Coulomb potential. We investigate two common splittings of the 1/r potential into long-range and short-range parts based on the Gaussian and error functions, and approximate either the entire intermolecular/interfragment interaction or only its attractive terms by the long-range contribution. These range separation schemes are tested for a number of intermolecular and intramolecular complexes. We find that the energy corrections from range-separated SAPT or ISAPT are in reasonable agreement with complete SAPT/ISAPT data. This result should be contrasted with the inability of the long-range multipole expansion to describe crucial short-range charge penetration and exchange effects; it shows that the long-range interaction potential does not just recover the asymptotic interaction energy but also provides a useful account of short-range terms. The best consistency is attained for the error-function separation applied to all interaction terms, both attractive and repulsive. This study is the first step toward a fragmentation-free decomposition of intramolecular nonbonded energy.

Intermolecular interaction energies with AROFRAG-A systematic approach for fragmentation of aromatic molecules.

Intermolecular interactions with polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) represent an important area of physisorption studies. These investigations are often hampered by a size of interacting PAHs, which makes the calculation prohibitively expensive. Therefore, methods designed to deal with large molecules could be helpful to reduce the computational costs of such studies. Recently we have introduced a new systematic approach for the molecular fragmentation of PAHs, denoted as AROFRAG, which decomposes a large PAH molecule into a set of predefined small PAHs with a benzene ring being the smallest unbreakable unit, and which in conjunction with the Molecules-in-Molecules (MIM) approach provides an accurate description of total molecular energies. In this contribution we propose an extension of the AROFRAG, which provides a description of intermolecular interactions for complexes composed of PAH molecules. The examination of interaction energy partitioning for various test cases shows that the AROFRAG3 model connected with the MIM approach accurately reproduces all important components of the interaction energy. An additional important finding in our study is that the computationally expensive long-range electron-correlation part of the interaction energy, that is,the dispersion component, is well described at lower AROFRAG levels even without MIM, which makes the latter models interesting alternatives to existing methods for an accurate description of the electron-correlated part of the interaction energy.

Low-Energy Theorems for Neutron–Proton Scattering in χ\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$\\chi $$\\end{document}EFT Using a Perturbative Power Counting

Low-energy theorems (LETs) for effective-range parameters in nucleon-nucleon scattering encode properties of the long-range part of the nuclear force. We compute LETs for S-wave neutron–proton scattering using chiral effective field theory with a modified version of Weinberg power counting. Corrections to the leading order amplitude are included in distorted-wave perturbation theory and we incorporate contributions up to the third order in the power counting. We find that LETs in the 1S0\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^1S_0$$\\end{document} and 3S1\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^3S_1$$\\end{document} partial waves agree well with empirical effective-range parameters. At the same time, phase shifts up to laboratory scattering energies of about 100 MeV can be reproduced. We show that it is important to consider the pion mass splitting in the one-pion exchange potential in the 1S0\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^1S_0$$\\end{document} partial wave while the effect is negligible in the 3S1\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^3S_1$$\\end{document} partial wave. We conclude that pion exchanges, as treated in this power counting, accurately describe the long-range part of the S-wave nuclear interaction.

Improving potential energy surfaces using measured Feshbach resonance states.

The structure and dynamics of a molecular system is governed by its potential energy surface (PES), representing the total energy as a function of the nuclear coordinates. Obtaining accurate potential energy surfaces is limited by the exponential scaling of Hilbert space, restricting quantitative predictions of experimental observables from first principles to small molecules with just a few electrons. Here, we present an explicitly physics-informed approach for improving and assessing the quality of families of PESs by modifying them through linear coordinate transformations based on experimental data. We demonstrate this "morphing" of the PES for the He - H2+ complex using recent comprehensive Feshbach resonance (FR) measurements for reference PESs at three different levels of quantum chemistry. In all cases, the positions and intensities of peaks in the energy distributions are improved. We find these observables to be mainly sensitive to the long-range part of the PES.

An efficient method to establish electrostatic screening lengths of restricted primitive model electrolytes.

We present a novel, and computationally cheap, way to estimate electrostatic screening lengths from simulations of restricted primitive model (RPM) electrolytes. We demonstrate that the method is accurate by comparisons with simulated long-ranged parts of the charge density, at various Bjerrum lengths, salt concentrations and ion diameters. We find substantial underscreening in low dielectric solvent, but with an "aqueous" solvent, there is instead overscreening, the degree of which increases with ion size. Our method also offers a possible path to (future) more accurate classical density functional treatments of ionic fluids.

Using Noncovalent Interactions to Test the Precision of Projector-Augmented Wave Data Sets.

The projector-augmented wave (PAW) method is one of the approaches that are widely used to approximately treat core electrons and thus to speed up plane-wave basis set electronic structure calculations. However, PAW involves approximations, and it is thus important to understand how they affect the results. Tests of the precision of PAW data sets often use the properties of isolated atoms or atomic solids. While this is sufficient to identify problematic PAW data sets, little information has been gained to understand the origins of the errors and suggest ways to correct them. Here, we show that the interaction energies of molecular dimers are very useful not only to identify problematic PAW data sets but also to uncover the origin of the errors. Using dimers from the S22 and S66 test sets and other dimers, we find that the error in the interaction energy is composed of a short-range component with an exponential decay and a long-range electrostatic part caused by an error in the total charge density. We propose and evaluate a simple improvable scheme to correct the long-range error and find that even in its simple and readily usable form, it is able to reduce the interaction energy errors to less than half on average for hydrogen-bonded dimers.

A study on the extension of correlation functions obtained from molecular dynamics simulations by the Ornstein–Zernike theory for modeled molten salts

We extend the correlation functions obtained by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation for a molten salt modeled as a superposition of the Lennard-Jones (LJ) and Coulomb potentials using the hybrid closure method, which employs the Ornstein–Zernike (OZ) theory coupled with a closure relation. An appropriate distance for switching the short-range MD part and the long-range OZ part is determined by monitoring the isothermal compressibility, excess internal energy, and pressure. The Kobryn–Gusarov–Kovalenko (KGK) closure relation is mainly employed for the hybrid closure method (MD–KGK hybrid closure). The hybrid closure with either the hypernetted chain (HNC) or Kovalenko–Hirata (KH) closure was also tested to confirm that the performance was almost equivalent to one another among the MD–HNC, MD–KH, and MD–KGK methods. The bridge function for the model molten salt is extracted using the MD–KGK hybrid closure method. At a high-density state, the bridge function shows a steep increase in the repulsive core region, as is often observed for simple fluids, whereas when the density is relatively low, the bridge function for the cation–anion pair shows a downward-sloping behavior. Furthermore, the accuracies of excess internal energy, pressure, and isothermal compressibility were also examined for the HNC, KH, and KGK approximations. For molten salt systems, these approximations exhibited a similar behavior to those for monatomic LJ fluids, especially in the high-density state. The analysis of the integrand for excess internal energy and pressure is also discussed.

Fast Ewald summation for Stokes flow with arbitrary periodicity

A fast and spectrally accurate Ewald summation method for the evaluation of stokeslet, stresslet and rotlet potentials of three-dimensional Stokes flow is presented. This work extends the previously developed Spectral Ewald method for Stokes flow to periodic boundary conditions in any number (three, two, one, or none) of the spatial directions, in a unified framework. The periodic potential is split into a short-range and a long-range part, where the latter is treated in Fourier space using the fast Fourier transform. A crucial component of the method is the modified kernels used to treat singular integration. We derive new modified kernels, and new improved truncation error estimates for the stokeslet and stresslet. An automated procedure for selecting parameters based on a given error tolerance is designed and tested. Analytical formulas for validation in the doubly and singly periodic cases are presented. We show that the computational time of the method scales like O(Nlog⁡N) for N sources and targets, and investigate how the time depends on the error tolerance and window function, i.e. the function used to smoothly spread irregular point data to a uniform grid. The method is fastest in the fully periodic case, while the run time in the free-space case is around three times as large. Furthermore, the highest efficiency is reached when applying the method to a uniform source distribution in a primary cell with low aspect ratio. The work presented in this paper enables efficient and accurate simulations of three-dimensional Stokes flow with arbitrary periodicity using e.g. boundary integral and potential methods.

Exact exchange with range-separated algorithm for thermodynamic limit of periodic Hartree-Fock theory.

The expensive cost of computing exact exchange in periodic systems limits the application range of density functional theory with hybrid functionals. To reduce the computational cost of exact change, we present a range-separated algorithm to compute electron repulsion integrals for Gaussian-type crystal basis. The algorithm splits the full-range Coulomb interactions into short-range and long-range parts, which are, respectively, computed in real and reciprocal space. This approach significantly reduces the overall computational cost, as integrals can be efficiently computed in both regions. The algorithm can efficiently handle large numbers of k points with limited central processing unit (CPU) and memory resources. As a demonstration, we performed an all-electron k-point Hartree-Fock calculation for LiH crystal with one million Gaussian basis functions, which was completed on a desktop computer in 1400 CPU hours.

Quantum Monte Carlo study of superconductivity in rhombohedral trilayer graphene under an electric field

By using the constrained-phase quantum Monte Carlo method, we performed a systematic study of the ground state of the half filled Hubbard model for a trilayer honeycomb lattice. We analyze the effect of the perpendicular electric field on the electronic structure, magnetic property, and pairing correlations. It is found that the antiferromagnetism is suppressed by the perpendicular electric field, especially the long-range parts, and the dominant magnetic fluctuations are still antiferromagnetic. The electronic correlation drives a $d+id$ superconducting pairing to be dominant over other pairing patterns among various electric fields and interaction strengths. We also found that the $d+id$ pairing correlation is greatly enhanced as the on-site Coulomb interaction is increased. Our intensive numerical results may unveil the nature of the recently observed superconductivity in rhombohedral trilayer graphene under an electric field.

Unveiling the role of long-range and short-range forces in the non-productive adsorption between lignin and cellulases at different temperatures

Quantitatively understanding of interaction mechanism between lignin and cellulases is essential for the efficient improvement of lignocellulose enzymatic hydrolysis. However, the individual contribution of multiple forces between lignin and cellulases to the non-productive adsorption of enzymes still remains deeply ambiguous, especially in situations of near enzymatic hydrolysis temperatures. Herein, atomic force microscopy (AFM) and computational simulations were utilized to quantitatively analyze the intermolecular forces between lignin and enzyme at 25 °C and 40 °C. Our results unveiled that an increase in temperature obviously improved adsorption capacity and total intermolecular forces between lignin and cellulases. This positive relationship mainly comes from the increase in the decay length of hydrophobic forces for lignin-cellulases when temperature increases. Different from the hydrophobic interaction which provides long-range part of attractions, van der Waals forces dominate the intermolecular force only at approaches < 2 nm. On the other hand, electrostatic forces exhibited repulsive effects, and its intensity and distance were limited due to the low surface potential of cellulases. Short-range forces including hydrogen bonding (main) and π-π stacking (minor) stabilize the non-specific binding of enzymes to lignin, but increasing temperature reduces hydrogen bond number. Therefore, the relative contribution of long-range forces increased markedly at higher temperatures, which benefits protein capture and brings lignin and cellulase close together. Finally, the structure–activity relationships between lignin physicochemical properties and its inhibitory effect to enzymes indicated that hydrophobic interactions, hydrogen bonding, and steric effects drive the final adsorption capacity and glucose yields. This work provides quantitative and basic insights into the mechanism of lignin-cellulase interfacial interactions and guides design of saccharification enhancement approaches.

Tomography of Feshbach resonance states

Feshbach resonances are fundamental to interparticle interactions and become particularly important in cold collisions with atoms, ions, and molecules. In this work, we present the detection of Feshbach resonances in a benchmark system for strongly interacting and highly anisotropic collisions: molecular hydrogen ions colliding with noble gas atoms. The collisions are launched by cold Penning ionization, which exclusively populates Feshbach resonances that span both short- and long-range parts of the interaction potential. We resolved all final molecular channels in a tomographic manner using ion-electron coincidence detection. We demonstrate the nonstatistical nature of the final-state distribution. By performing quantum scattering calculations on ab initio potential energy surfaces, we show that the isolation of the Feshbach resonance pathways reveals their distinctive fingerprints in the collision outcome.

Local position-space two-nucleon potentials from leading to fourth order of chiral effective field theory

We present local, position-space chiral NN potentials through four orders of chiral effective field theory ranging from leading order (LO) to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO, fourth order) of the Delta-less version of the theory. The long-range parts of these potentials are fixed by the very accurate pi-N LECs as determined in the Roy-Steiner equations analysis. At the highest order (N3LO), the NN data below 190 MeV laboratory energy are reproduced with the respectable chi^2/datum of 1.45. A comparison of the N3LO potential with the phenomenological Argonne v_18 (AV18) potential reveals substantial agreement between the two potentials in the intermediate range ruled by chiral symmetry, thus, providing a chiral underpinning for the phenomenological AV18 potential. Our chiral NN potentials may serve as a solid basis for systematic ab initio calculations of nuclear structure and reactions that allow for a comprehensive error analysis. In particular, the order by order development of the potentials will make possible a reliable determination of the truncation error at each order. Our new family of local position-space potentials differs from existing potentials of this kind by a weaker tensor force as reflected in relatively low D-state probabilities of the deuteron (P_D less or equal 4.0% for our N3LO potentials) and predictions for the triton binding energy above 8.00 MeV (from two-body forces alone). As a consequence, our potentials may lead to different predictions when applied to light and intermediate-mass nuclei in ab initio calculations and, potentially, help solve some of the outstanding problems in microscopic nuclear structure.

Further investigations into a Laplace MP2 method using range separated Coulomb potential and orbital selective virtuals: Multipole correction, OSV extrapolation, and critical assessment.

We report further investigations to aid the development of a Laplace MP2 (second-order Møller Plesset) method with a range separated Coulomb potential partitioned into short- and long-range parts. The implementation of the method extensively uses sparse matrix algebra, density fitting techniques for the short-range part, and a Fourier transformation in spherical coordinates for the long-range part of the potential. Localized molecular orbitals are employed for the occupied space, whereas virtual space is described by orbital specific virtual orbitals (OSVs) associated with localized molecular orbitals. The Fourier transform is deficient for very large distances between localized occupied orbitals, and a multipole expansion for widely separated pairs is introduced for the direct MP2 contribution, which is applicable also to non-Coulombic potentials that do not satisfy the Laplace equation. For the exchange contribution, an efficient screening of contributing localized occupied pairs is employed, which is discussed more completely here. To mitigate errors due to the truncation of OSVs, a simple and efficient extrapolation procedure is used to obtain results close to MP2 for the full basis set of atomic orbitals Using a suitable set of default parameters, the accuracy of the approach is demonstrated. The current implementation of the approach is not very efficient, and the aim of this paper is to introduce and critically discuss ideas that can have more general applicability beyond MP2 calculations for large molecules.

Electron-phonon interaction and phonon frequencies in two-dimensional doped semiconductors

Electron-phonon interaction and phonon frequencies of doped polar semiconductors are sensitive to long-range Coulomb forces and can be strongly affected by the screening effects of free carriers, the latter changing significantly when approaching the two-dimensional limit. We tackle this problem within a linear-response dielectric-matrix formalism, where the screening effects can be properly taken into account by generalized effective charge functions and the inverse scalar dielectric function, allowing for controlled approximations in relevant limits. We propose complementary computational methods to evaluate from first principles both effective charges---encompassing all multipolar components beyond dynamical dipoles and quadrupoles---and the static dielectric function of doped two-dimensional semiconductors and provide analytical expressions for the long-range part of the dynamical matrix and the electron-phonon interaction in the long-wavelength limit. As a representative example, we apply our approach to study the impact of doping in disproportionated graphene, showing that optical Fr\"ohlich and acoustic piezoelectric couplings, as well as the slope of optical longitudinal modes, are strongly reduced, with a potential impact on the electronic/intrinsic scattering rates and related transport properties.

First-principles evaluation of the second harmonic generation response of reference organic and inorganic crystals.

Using the CRYSTAL17 package at the coupled-perturbed Kohn-Sham (CPKS) level, periodic boundary conditions first-principles calculations are enacted to predict the second harmonic generation second-order nonlinear optical (NLO) susceptibility, χ(2), values of six historical NLO crystals. This selection allowed the comparison between state-of-the-art calculations and experiment. Several computational aspects are tackled to define conditions where the results are converged with respect to the range of lattice summations, to the number of k-points in the first Brillouin zone, to the order of the multipole expansions for evaluating the long-range part of the electrostatic interactions, as well as to the atomic basis set size. A valence triple zeta basis set supplemented with polarization functions has been selected. Then, χ(2) calculations have been performed using a range of exchange-correlation functionals (XCFs). Results show the large impact of the amount of Hartree-Fock (HF) exchange on the amplitude but also on the signon the χ(2) tensor components. To a given extent, these amplitude effects are consistent with results on molecules, but the signreversal effects and the non-monotonic behavior of the χ(2) tensor components as a function of the amount of HF exchange are scarcely found for molecules. Then, using the recommended range-separated hybrid XCFs, the CPKS scheme leads to good agreement with experimental data for potassium dihydrogenophosphate, urea, and χZXX (2) of LiNbO3. The agreement is more questionable for χZZZ (2) of LiNbO3 whereas it remains poor for ammonium dihydrogenophosphate and 2-methyl-4-nitroaniline, with large underestimations by about a factor of 3, opening a path to further fine-tuning of the ranges of inclusion of HF exchange.

Low-temperature kinetics for the N + NO reaction: experiment guides the way.

The reaction N(4S) + NO(X2Π) → O(3P) + N2(X1Σ+g) plays a pivotal role in the conversion of atomic to molecular nitrogen in dense interstellar clouds and in the atmosphere. Here we report a joint experimental and computational investigation of the N + NO reaction with the aim of providing improved constraints on its low temperature reactivity. Thermal rates were measured over the 50 to 296 K range in a continuous supersonic flow reactor coupled with pulsed laser photolysis and laser induced fluorescence for the production and detection of N(4S) atoms, respectively. With decreasing temperature, the experimentally measured reaction rate was found to monotonously increase up to a value of (6.6 ± 1.3) × 10-11 cm3 s-1 at 50 K. To confirm this finding, quasi-classical trajectory simulations were carried out on a previously validated, full-dimensional potential energy surface (PES). However, around 50 K the computed rates decreased which required re-evaluation of the reactive PES in the long-range part due to a small spurious barrier with a height of ∼40 K in the entrance channel. By exploring different correction schemes the measured thermal rates can be adequately reproduced, displaying a clear negative temperature dependence over the entire temperature range. The possible astrochemical implications of an increased reaction rate at low temperature are also discussed.

A transferrable range-separated force field for water: Combining the power of both physically-motivated models and machine learning techniques.

An accurate, transferrable, and computationally efficient potential energy surface is of paramount importance for all molecular mechanics simulations. In this work, by using water as an example, we demonstrate how one can construct a reliable force field by combining the advantages of both physically motivated and data-driven machine learning methods. Different from the existing water models based on molecular many-body expansion, we adopt a separation scheme that is completely based on distances, which is more convenient for generic molecular systems. The geometry dependence of atomic charges and dispersion coefficients are also introduced to improve the accuracy of the long-range part of the potential. The new potential provides a physically interpretable energy decomposition, and it is more accurate than the conventional physically motived potentials. Most importantly, through this study, we show that the information we learn from small clusters can be extrapolated into larger systems, thus providing a general recipe for the intermolecular force field development at the coupled-cluster singles and doubles plus perturbative triples level of theory in the future.

Global Full-Dimensional Potential Energy Surface for the Reaction 23Na87Rb + 23Na87Rb → 23Na2 + 87Rb2 and the Formation Rate and Lifetime of the 23Na287Rb2 Collision Complex.

A full-dimensional global potential energy surface (PES) for the reaction 23Na87Rb + 23Na87Rb → 23Na2 + 87Rb2 was constructed based on high-level ab initio calculations. The short-range part was expressed as a permutation invariant polynomial-neural network (PIP-NN) fit of 22 003 ab initio points calculated using a coupled cluster method with the one-electron basis 5s5p5d2f plus effective core potentials and core polarizability potentials, while the long-range part was represented in an asymptotically correct form based on multipole expansion. The formation rate of the 23Na287Rb2 complex calculated using a quantum statistical method is in good agreement with experiment, while the estimated 19.20 μs lifetime of the complex from Rice-Ramsperger-Kassel-Marcus (RRKM) theory is significantly shorter than the measured millisecond decay rate, signaling either the inadequacy of RRKM theory or a yet unresolved loss mechanism.

Ab initio relativistic potential energy surface with analytical long-range part of benzene-Rn complex and its application to intermolecular vibrations

We study the benzene-Rn (BzRn) complex in its electronic ground state using an ab initio scalar relativistic method in the framework of the coupled-cluster level of theory with single, double, and perturbative triple excitations [CCSD(T)]. Two different approaches to treat the scalar relativistic effects have been tested — the small-core pseudopotential (PP) and the Douglas–Kroll–Hess (DKH) Hamiltonian. These methods were used with the augmented Dunning’s double zeta basis set for C and H atoms, and the augmented triple PP basis set for Rn supplemented by midbond functions. Additionally, the effects of the basis extension for C and H atoms and the extension of the correlation space to include the internal orbitals of Rn and C have been tested. The comparison of the binding energy De and the equilibrium coordinate ze found with different methods has allowed to choose the optimal one based on PP for the construction of the analytical potential energy surface (PES). The long-range part of the potential has been fitted separately and the obtained long-range coefficients have been compared to their counterparts calculated from the first principles using the CCSD polarization propagator. The vibrational energy level pattern of BzRn has been studied, and the revealed polyad structure of the complex has been compared to the previously studied benzene-Kr and benzene-Xe complexes. A Python code that yields the interaction energy at any Rn position is provided.