No Arabic abstract
Given the piecewise approach to modeling intermolecular interactions for force fields, they can be difficult to parameterize since they are fit to data like total energies that only indirectly connect to their separable functional forms. Furthermore, by neglecting certain types of molecular interactions such as charge penetration and charge transfer, most classical force fields must rely on, but do not always demonstrate, how cancellation of errors occurs among the remaining molecular interactions accounted for such as exchange repulsion, electrostatics, and polarization. In this work we present the first generation of the (many-body) MB-UCB force field that explicitly accounts for the decomposed molecular interactions commensurate with a variational energy decomposition analysis, including charge transfer, with force field design choices that reduce the computational expense of the MB-UCB potential while remaining accurate. We optimize parameters using only single water molecule and water cluster data up through pentamers, with no fitting to condensed phase data, and we demonstrate that high accuracy is maintained when the force field is subsequently validated against conformational energies of larger water cluster data sets, radial distribution functions of the liquid phase, and the temperature dependence of thermodynamic and transport water properties. We conclude that MB-UCB is comparable in performance to MB-Pol, but is less expensive and more transferable by eliminating the need to represent short-ranged interactions through large parameter fits to high order polynomials.
An accurate force field is the key to the success of all molecular mechanics simulations on organic polymers and biomolecules. Accuracy beyond density functional theory is often needed to describe the intermolecular interactions, while most correlated wavefunction (CW) methods are prohibitively expensive for large molecules. Therefore, it posts a great challenge to develop an extendible ab initio force field for large flexible organic molecules at CW level of accuracy. In this work, we face this challenge by combining the physics-driven nonbonding potential with a data-driven subgraph neural network bonding model (named sGNN). Tests on polyethylene glycol polymer chains show that our strategy is highly accurate and robust for molecules of different sizes. Therefore, we can develop the force field from small molecular fragments (with sizes easily accessible to CW methods) and safely transfer it to large polymers, thus opening a new path to the next-generation organic force fields.
Verstraelen et al. (J. Chem. Theory Comput. 12 (2016) 3894-3912) recently introduced a new method for partitioning the electron density of a material into constituent atoms. Their approach falls within the class of atomic population analysis methods called stockholder charge partitioning methods in which a material electron distribution is divided into overlapping atoms. The Minimal Basis Iterative Stockholder (MBIS) method proposed by Verstraelen et al. composes the pro-atom density as a sum of exponential functions, where the number of exponential functions equals that elements row in the Periodic Table. Specifically, one exponential function is used for H and He, two for Li through Ne, three for Na through Ar, etc. In the MBIS method, the exponential functions parameters defining the pro-atom density are optimized in a self-consistent iterative procedure. Close examination reveals some important anomalies in the article by Verstaelen et al. The purpose of this comment article is to bring these important issues to readers attention and to start a discussion of them.
We present an ab initio approach for evaluating a free energy profile along a reaction coordinate by combining logarithmic mean force dynamics (LogMFD) and first-principles molecular dynamics. The mean force, which is the derivative of the free energy with respect to the reaction coordinate, is estimated using density functional theory (DFT) in the present approach, which is expected to provide an accurate free energy profile along the reaction coordinate. We apply this new method, first-principles LogMFD (FP-LogMFD), to a glycine dipeptide molecule and reconstruct one- and two-dimensional free energy profiles in the framework of DFT. The resultant free energy profile is compared with that obtained by the thermodynamic integration method and by the previous LogMFD calculation using an empirical force-field, showing that FP-LogMFD is a promising method to calculate free energy without empirical force-fields.
The study of chemical reactions in aqueous media is very important for its implications in several fields of science, from biology to industrial processes. Modelling these reactions is however difficult when water directly participates in the reaction. Since it requires a fully quantum mechanical description of the system, $textit{ab-initio}$ molecular dynamics is the ideal candidate to shed light on these processes. However, its scope is limited by a high computational cost. A popular alternative is to perform molecular dynamics simulations powered by machine learning potentials, trained on an extensive set of quantum mechanical calculations. Doing so reliably for reactive processes is difficult because it requires including very many intermediate and transition state configurations. In this study, we used an active learning procedure accelerated by enhanced sampling to harvest such structures and to build a neural-network potential to study the urea decomposition process in water. This allowed us to obtain the free energy profiles of this important reaction in a wide range of temperatures, to discover a number of novel metastable states and to improve the accuracy of the kinetic rates calculations. Furthermore, we found that the formation of the zwitterionic intermediate has the same probability of occurring via an acidic or a basic pathway, which could be the cause of the insensitivity of reaction rates to the pH solution.
Kernel ridge regression (KRR) that satisfies energy conservation is a popular approach for predicting forcefield and molecular potential, to overcome the computational bottleneck of molecular dynamics simulation. However, the computational complexity of KRR increases cubically as the product of the number of atoms and simulated configurations in the training sample, due to the inversion of a large covariance matrix, which limits its applications to the simulation of small molecules. Here, we introduce the atomized force field (AFF) model that requires much less computational costs to achieve the quantum-chemical level of accuracy for predicting atomic forces and potential energies. Through a data-driven partition on the covariance kernel matrix of the force field and an induced input estimation approach on potential energies, we dramatically reduce the computational complexity of the machine learning algorithm and maintain high accuracy in predictions. The efficient machine learning algorithm extends the limits of its applications on larger molecules under the same computational budget. Using the MD17 dataset and another simulated dataset on larger molecules, we demonstrate that the accuracy of the AFF emulator ranges from 0.01-0.1 kcal mol$^{-1}$ or energies and 0.001-0.2 kcal mol$^{-1}$ $require{mediawiki-texvc}$$AA^{-1}$ for atomic forces. Most importantly, the accuracy was achieved by less than 5 minutes of computational time for training the AFF emulator and for making predictions on held-out molecular configurations. Furthermore, our approach contains uncertainty assessment of predictions of atomic forces and potentials, useful for developing a sequential design over the chemical input space, with nearly no increase of computational costs.