Development of polarizable water models

Abstract

Polarization plays a significant role in the physical and chemical properties of water, thus polarizable water models have been extensively evolved and studied in the past several decades. In this dissertation, two polarizable water models have been extended, and some physical properties in gas phase and condensed phase were studied and analyzed. It was verified that the out-of-plane polarization effect is of great importance in some physical properties. Besides, we proved that there are some connections between these two models, although they were derived from different methodologies.

The first polarizable water model we developed was a combination of charge response kernel (CRK) method and polarizable point dipole (PPD) method. In the CRK method, a CRK matrix is defined as the second order derivative of energy with respect to the external potential at atomic sites. It is applied to represent the intensity of charge response to external environment. While in the PPD method, the polarizability tensor which is the second order derivative of energy with respect to external field at the same site, is introduced to characterize the variation of dipole moment in the presence of external perturbation. In our method, we proved that although the CRK matrix of three-site water model has 9 element, it only carries two independent variables, and these two variables only rely on the water geometry and the in-plane polarizability. Thus besides the CRK matrix located on each atomic site, an additional polarizability residing on oxygen atom specifically inducing dipole moment along the direction perpendicular to the water plane was added in our model. With the addition of the out-of-plane description, some physical properties were much enhanced.

In the second polarizable water model we extended, electronegativity equalization (EE) method was employed. In this three-site water model, atomic electronegativity and hardness matrix were the first and second order derivative of energy with respect to the partial charge on atomic sites, respectively. In this method, electronegativity differs among different atom types, and the off-diagonal elements in hardness matrix are related on not only atom types but also distances among the corresponding atoms. Accordingly, the intramolecular water deformation can be included. Thus flexible polarizable water model is accessible. With flexibility, this water model is more realistic. Our model validated that more flexible parameterization and geometry could improve the physical performance. At last, we connected the second polarizable water model with the first one. Although the two polarizable models were derived from different methodologies, we proved that under one simple approximation, corresponding CRK matrix can be achieved from hardness matrix.