No Arabic abstract
We perform ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulation of liquid water in the canonical ensemble at ambient conditions using the SCAN meta-GGA functional approximation, and carry out systematic comparisons with the results obtained from the GGA-level PBE functional, and Tkatchenko-Scheffler van der Waals (vdW) dispersion correction inclusive PBE functional. We analyze various properties of liquid water including radial distribution functions, oxygen-oxygen-oxygen triplet angular distribution, tetrahedrality, hydrogen bonds, diffusion coefficients, ring statistics, density of states, band gaps, and dipole moments. We find that the SCAN functional is generally more accurate than the other two functionals for liquid water by not only capturing the intermediate-range vdW interactions but also mitigating the overly strong hydrogen bonds prescribed in PBE simulations. We also compare the results of SCAN-based AIMD simulations in the canonical and isothermal-isobaric ensembles. Our results suggest that SCAN provides a reliable description for most structural, electronic, and dynamical properties in liquid water.
Water is of the utmost importance for life and technology. However, a genuinely predictive ab initio model of water has eluded scientists. We demonstrate that a fully ab initio approach, relying on the strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) density functional, provides such a description of water. SCAN accurately describes the balance among covalent bonds, hydrogen bonds, and van der Waals interactions that dictates the structure and dynamics of liquid water. Notably, SCAN captures the density difference between water and ice I{it h} at ambient conditions, as well as many important structural, electronic, and dynamic properties of liquid water. These successful predictions of the versatile SCAN functional open the gates to study complex processes in aqueous phase chemistry and the interactions of water with other materials in an efficient, accurate, and predictive, ab initio manner.
We have employed molecular dynamics simulations based on the TIP4P/2005 water model to investigate the local structural, dynamical, and dielectric properties of the two recently reported body-centered-cubic and face-centered-cubic plastic crystal phases of water. Our results reveal significant differences in the local orientational structure and rotational dynamics of water molecules for the two polymorphs. The probability distributions of trigonal and tetrahedral order parameters exhibit a multi-modal structure, implying the existence of significant local orientational heterogeneities, particularly in the face-centered-cubic phase. The calculated hydrogen bond statistics and dynamics provide further indications of the existence of a strongly heterogeneous and rapidly interconverting local orientational structural network in both polymorphs. We have observed a hindered molecular rotation, much more pronounced in the body-centered-cubic phase, which is reflected by the decay of the fourth-order Legendre reorientational correlation functions and angular Van Hove functions. Molecular rotation, however, is additionally hindered in the high-pressure liquid compared to the plastic crystal phase. The results obtained also reveal significant differences in the dielectric properties of the polymorphs due to the different dipolar orientational correlation characterizing each phase.
Feynman path-integral deep potential molecular dynamics (PI-DPMD) calculations have been employed to study both light (H$_2$O) and heavy water (D$_2$O) within the isothermal-isobaric ensemble. In particular, the deep neural network is trained based on ab initio data obtained from the strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) exchange-correlation functional. Because of the lighter mass of hydrogen than deuteron, the properties of light water is more influenced by nuclear quantum effect than those of heavy water. Clear isotope effects are observed and analyzed in terms of hydrogen-bond structure and electronic properties of water that are closely associated with experimental observables. The molecular structures of both liquid H$_2$O and D$_2$O agree well with the data extracted from scattering experiments. The delicate isotope effects on radial distribution functions and angular distribution functions are well reproduced as well. Our approach demonstrates that deep neural network combined with SCAN functional based ab initio molecular dynamics provides an accurate theoretical tool for modeling water and its isotope effects.
Ab initio molecular dynamics simulation is used to study the structure and electronic properties of the liquid Ga-Se system at the three compositions Ga$_2$Se, GaSe and Ga$_2$Se$_3$, and of the GaSe and Ga$_2$Se$_3$ crystals. The calculated equilibrium structure of GaSe crystal agrees well with available experimental data. The neutron-weighted liquid structure factors calculated from the simulations are in reasonable agreement with recent neutron diffraction measurements. Simulation results for the partial radial distribution functions show that the liquid structure is closely related to that of the crystals. A close similarity between solid and liquid is also found for the electronic density of states and charge density. The calculated electronic conductivity decreases strongly with increasing Se content, in accord with experimental measurements.
Classical density-functional theory provides an efficient alternative to molecular dynamics simulations for understanding the equilibrium properties of inhomogeneous fluids. However, application of density-functional theory to multi-site molecular fluids has so far been limited by complications due to the implicit molecular geometry constraints on the site densities, whose resolution typically requires expensive Monte Carlo methods. Here, we present a general scheme of circumventing this so-called inversion problem: compressed representations of the orientation density. This approach allows us to combine the superior iterative convergence properties of multipole representations of the fluid configuration with the improved accuracy of site-density functionals. Next, from a computational perspective, we show how to extend the DFT++ algebraic formulation of electronic density-functional theory to the classical fluid case and present a basis-independent discretization of our formulation for molecular classical density-functional theory. Finally, armed with the above general framework, we construct a simplified free-energy functional for water which captures the radial distributions, cavitation energies, and the linear and non-linear dielectric response of liquid water. The resulting approach will enable efficient and reliable first-principles studies of atomic-scale processes in contact with solution or other liquid environments.