A Critical Assessment of Two-Body and Three-Body Interactions in Water

The microscopic behavior of water under different conditions and in different environments remains the subject of intense debate. A great number of the controversies arise due to the contradictory predictions obtained within different theoretical models. Relative to conclusions derived from force fields or density functional theory, there is comparably less room to dispute highly correlated electronic structure calculations. Unfortunately, such ab initio calculations are severely limited by system size. In this study, a detailed analysis of the two- and three-body water interactions evaluated at the CCSD(T) level is carried out to quantitatively assess the accuracy of several force fields, DFT models, and ab initio based interaction potentials that are commonly used in molecular simulations. On the basis of this analysis, a new model, HBB2-pol, is introduced which is capable of accurately mapping CCSD(T) results for water dimers and trimers into an efficient analytical function. The accuracy of HBB2-pol is further established through comparison with the experimentally determined second and third virial coefficients.