A classical reactive potential for molecular clusters of sulphuric acid and water

We present a two-state empirical valence bond (EVB) potential describing interactions between sulphuric acid and water molecules and designed to model proton transfer between them within a classical dynamical framework. The potential has been developed in order to study the properties of molecular clusters of these species, which are thought to be relevant to atmospheric aerosol nucleation. The particle swarm optimisation method has been used to fit the parameters of the EVB model to density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Features of the parametrised model and DFT data are compared and found to be in satisfactory agreement. In particular, it is found that a single sulphuric acid molecule will donate a proton when clustered with four water molecules at 300 K and that this threshold is temperature dependent.