No Arabic abstract
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.
Within the framework of Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT), the ability to provide good predictions of water properties by employing a strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) functional has been extensively demonstrated in recent years. Here, we further advance the modeling of water by building a more accurate model on the fourth rung of Jacobs ladder with the hybrid functional, SCAN0. In particular, we carry out both classical and Feynman path-integral molecular dynamics calculations of water with the SCAN0 functional and the isobaric-isothermal ensemble. In order to generate the equilibrated structure of water, a deep neural network potential is trained from the atomic potential energy surface based on ab initio data obtained from SCAN0 DFT calculations. For the electronic properties of water, a separate deep neural network potential is trained using the Deep Wannier method based on the maximally localized Wannier functions of the equilibrated trajectory at the SCAN0 level. The structural, dynamic, and electric properties of water were analyzed. The hydrogen-bond structures, density, infrared spectra, diffusion coefficients, and dielectric constants of water, in the electronic ground state, are computed using a large simulation box and long simulation time. For the properties involving electronic excitations, we apply the GW approximation within many-body perturbation theory to calculate the quasiparticle density of states and bandgap of water. Compared to the SCAN functional, mixing exact exchange mitigates the self-interaction error in the meta-generalized-gradient approximation and further softens liquid water towards the experimental direction. For most of the water properties, the SCAN0 functional shows a systematic improvement over the SCAN functional.
The increased energy and power density required in modern electronics poses a challenge for designing new dielectric polymer materials with high energy density while maintaining low loss at high applied electric fields. Recently, an advanced computational screening method coupled with hierarchical modelling has accelerated the identification of promising high energy density materials. It is well known that the dielectric response of polymeric materials is largely influenced by their phases and local heterogeneous structures as well as operational temperature. Such inputs are crucial to accelerate the design and discovery of potential polymer candidates. However, an efficient computational framework to probe temperature dependence of the dielectric properties of polymers, while incorporating effects controlled by their morphology is still lacking. In this paper, we propose a scalable computational framework based on reactive molecular dynamics with a valence-state aware polarizable charge model, which is capable of handling practically relevant polymer morphologies and simultaneously provide near-quantum accuracy in estimating dielectric properties of various polymer systems. We demonstrate the predictive power of our framework on high energy density polymer systems recently identified through rational experimental-theoretical co-design. Our scalable and automated framework may be used for high-throughput theoretical screenings of combinatorial large design space to identify next-generation high energy density polymer materials.
We propose a simple, but efficient and accurate machine learning (ML) model for developing high-dimensional potential energy surface. This so-called embedded atom neural network (EANN) approach is inspired by the well-known empirical embedded atom method (EAM) model used in condensed phase. It simply replaces the scalar embedded atom density in EAM with a Gaussian-type orbital based density vector, and represents the complex relationship between the embedded density vector and atomic energy by neural networks. We demonstrate that the EANN approach is equally accurate as several established ML models in representing both big molecular and extended periodic systems, yet with much fewer parameters and configurations. It is highly efficient as it implicitly contains the three-body information without an explicit sum of the conventional costly angular descriptors. With high accuracy and efficiency, EANN potentials can vastly accelerate molecular dynamics and spectroscopic simulations in complex systems at ab initio level.
The simulation of rare events is one of the key problems in atomistic simulations. Towards its solution a plethora of methods have been proposed. Here we combine two such methods metadynamics and inte-grated tempering sampling. In metadynamics the fluctuations of a carefully chosen collective variable are amplified, while in integrated tempering sampling the system is pushed to visit an approximately uniform interval of energies and allows exploring a range of temperatures in a single run. We describe our ap-proach and apply it to the two prototypical systems a SN2 chemical reaction and to the freezing of silica. The combination of metadynamics and integrated tempering sampling leads to a powerful method. In par-ticular in the case of silica we have measured more than one order of magnitude acceleration.
An accurate ab initio theory of the H-bond structure of liquid water requires a high-level exchange correlation approximation from density functional theory. Based on the liquid structures modeled by ab initio molecular dynamics by using maximally localized Wannier functions as a basis, we study the infrared spectrum of water within the canonical ensemble. In particular, we employ both the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) functional within the generalized gradient approximation (GGA) and the state-of-the-art meta-GGA level approximation provided by the strongly constrained and appropriately normed (SCAN) functional. We demonstrate that the SCAN functional improves not only the water structure but also the theoretical infrared spectrum of water. Our analyses show that the improvement in the stretching and bending bands can be mainly attributed to better descriptions of directional H bonding and the covalency at the inter- and intramolecular levels, respectively. On the other hand, better agreements in libration and hindered translation bands are due to the improved dynamics of the H-bond network enabled by a less structured liquid in the experimental direction. The spectrum predicted by SCAN shows much better agreement with experimental data than the conventionally widely adopted PBE functional at the GGA level.