Many-Body Contributions in Water Nanoclusters.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 36695562.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/acsnano.2c06077 and PMC identifier 10781035.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Many-body interactions in water are known to be important but difficult to treat in atomistic models and often are included only as a correction. Polarizable models treat them explicitly, with long-range many-body potentials, within their classical approximation. However, their calculation is computationally expensive. Here, we evaluate how relevant the contributions to the many-body interaction associated with different coordination shells are. We calculate the global energy minimum, and the corresponding configuration, for nanoclusters of up to 20 water molecules. We find that including the first coordination shell, i.e., the five-body term of the central molecule, is enough to approximate within 5% the global energy minimum and its structure. We show that this result is valid for three different polarizable models, the Dang-Chang, the MB-pol, and the Kozack-Jordan potentials. This result suggests a strategy to develop many-body potentials for water that are reliable and, at the same time, computationally efficient.