Benchmarking semi-empirical quantum chemical methods on liquid water

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Hauptverfasser: Wu, Xin, Elgabarty, Hossam, Alizadeh, Vahideh, Henao, Andres, Zysk, Frederik, Plessl, Christian, Ehlert, Sebastian, Hutter, Jürg, Kühne, Thomas D.
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Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wu, Xin
Elgabarty, Hossam
Alizadeh, Vahideh
Henao, Andres
Zysk, Frederik
Plessl, Christian
Ehlert, Sebastian
Hutter, Jürg
Kühne, Thomas D.
author_facet Wu, Xin
Elgabarty, Hossam
Alizadeh, Vahideh
Henao, Andres
Zysk, Frederik
Plessl, Christian
Ehlert, Sebastian
Hutter, Jürg
Kühne, Thomas D.
contents Stimulated by the renewed interest and recent developments in semi-empirical quantum chemical (SQC) methods for noncovalent interactions, we examine the properties of liquid water at ambient conditions by means of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, both with the conventional NDDO-type (neglect of diatomic differential overlap) methods, e.g. AM1 and PM6, and with DFTB-type (density-functional tight-binding) methods, e.g. DFTB2 and GFN-xTB. Besides the original parameter sets, some specifically reparametrized SQC methods (denoted as AM1-W, PM6-fm, and DFTB2-iBi) targeting various smaller water systems ranging from molecular clusters to bulk are considered as well. The quality of these different SQC methods for describing liquid water properties at ambient conditions are assessed by comparison to well-established experimental data and also to BLYP-D3 density functional theory-based ab initio MD simulations. Our analyses reveal that static and dynamics properties of bulk water are poorly described by all considered SQC methods with the original parameters, regardless of the underlying theoretical models, with most of the methods suffering from too weak hydrogen bonds and hence predicting a far too fluid water with highly distorted hydrogen bond kinetics. On the other hand, the reparametrized force-matchcd PM6-fm method is shown to be able to quantitatively reproduce the static and dynamic features of liquid water, and thus can be used as a computationally efficient alternative to electronic structure-based MD simulations for liquid water that requires extended length and time scales. DFTB2-iBi predicts a slightly overstructured water with reduced fluidity, whereas AM1-W gives an amorphous ice-like structure for water at ambient conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11867
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking semi-empirical quantum chemical methods on liquid water
Wu, Xin
Elgabarty, Hossam
Alizadeh, Vahideh
Henao, Andres
Zysk, Frederik
Plessl, Christian
Ehlert, Sebastian
Hutter, Jürg
Kühne, Thomas D.
Computational Physics
Soft Condensed Matter
Statistical Mechanics
Biological Physics
Chemical Physics
Stimulated by the renewed interest and recent developments in semi-empirical quantum chemical (SQC) methods for noncovalent interactions, we examine the properties of liquid water at ambient conditions by means of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, both with the conventional NDDO-type (neglect of diatomic differential overlap) methods, e.g. AM1 and PM6, and with DFTB-type (density-functional tight-binding) methods, e.g. DFTB2 and GFN-xTB. Besides the original parameter sets, some specifically reparametrized SQC methods (denoted as AM1-W, PM6-fm, and DFTB2-iBi) targeting various smaller water systems ranging from molecular clusters to bulk are considered as well. The quality of these different SQC methods for describing liquid water properties at ambient conditions are assessed by comparison to well-established experimental data and also to BLYP-D3 density functional theory-based ab initio MD simulations. Our analyses reveal that static and dynamics properties of bulk water are poorly described by all considered SQC methods with the original parameters, regardless of the underlying theoretical models, with most of the methods suffering from too weak hydrogen bonds and hence predicting a far too fluid water with highly distorted hydrogen bond kinetics. On the other hand, the reparametrized force-matchcd PM6-fm method is shown to be able to quantitatively reproduce the static and dynamic features of liquid water, and thus can be used as a computationally efficient alternative to electronic structure-based MD simulations for liquid water that requires extended length and time scales. DFTB2-iBi predicts a slightly overstructured water with reduced fluidity, whereas AM1-W gives an amorphous ice-like structure for water at ambient conditions.
title Benchmarking semi-empirical quantum chemical methods on liquid water
topic Computational Physics
Soft Condensed Matter
Statistical Mechanics
Biological Physics
Chemical Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11867