Water modeled as an intermediate element between carbon and silicon

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simplified coarse-grained water model, mW, that captures water's properties using short-range interactions, offering high accuracy and computational efficiency for simulating water-related phenomena.

Contribution

The development of a short-range interaction water model that accurately reproduces water's properties, challenging the reliance on electrostatics in traditional models.

Findings

mW reproduces water's energetics, density, and structure effectively.

The model achieves comparable or better accuracy than popular atomistic models.

It offers less than 1% of the computational cost of traditional models.

Abstract

Water and silicon are chemically dissimilar substances with common physical properties. Their liquids display a temperature of maximum density, increased diffusivity on compression, they form tetrahedral crystals and tetrahedral amorphous phases. The common feature to water, silicon and carbon is the formation of tetrahedrally coordinated units. We exploit these similarities to develop a coarse-grained model of water (mW) that is essentially an atom with tetrahedrality intermediate between carbon and silicon. mW mimics the hydrogen-bonded structure of water through the introduction of a nonbond angular dependent term that encourages tetrahedral configurations. The model departs from the prevailing paradigm in water modeling: the use of long-ranged forces (electrostatics) to produce short-ranged (hydrogen-bonded) structure. mW has only short-range interactions yet it reproduces the energetics, density and structure of liquid water, its anomalies and phase transitions with comparable or better accuracy than the most popular atomistic models of water, at less than 1% of the computational cost. We conclude that it is not the nature of the interactions but the connectivity of the molecules that determines the structural and thermodynamic behavior of water. The speedup in computing time provided by mW makes it particularly useful for the study of slow processes in deeply supercooled water, the mechanism of ice nucleation, wetting-drying transitions, and as a realistic water model for coarse-grained simulations of biomolecules and complex materials.