Improving Condensed Phase Water Dynamics with Explicit Nuclear Quantum Effects: the Polarizable Q-AMOEBA Force Field

TL;DR

This paper introduces Q-AMOEBA, a polarizable water force field incorporating nuclear quantum effects via adQTB, improving water property predictions and enabling large-scale biophysical simulations at low computational cost.

Contribution

The development of Q-AMOEBA, a new parametrization of the AMOEBA force field that explicitly includes nuclear quantum effects with comparable cost to classical MD.

Findings

Q-AMOEBA accurately reproduces gas and condensed phase water properties.

It improves infrared spectroscopy predictions over previous models.

NQEs' impact varies with the model's functional form and hydrogen bond strength.

Abstract

We introduce a new parametrization of the AMOEBA polarizable force field for water denoted Q-AMOEBA, for use in simulations that explicitly account for nuclear quantum effects (NQEs). This study is made possible thanks to the recently introduced adaptive Quantum Thermal Bath (adQTB) simulation technique which computational cost is comparable to classical molecular dynamics. The flexible Q-AMOEBA model conserves the initial AMOEBA functional form, with an intermolecular potential including an atomic multipole description of electrostatic interactions (up to quadrupole), a polarization contribution based on the Thole interaction model and a buffered 14-7 potential to model van der Waals interactions. It has been obtained by using a Force Balance fitting strategy including high-level quantum chemistry reference energies and selected condensed phase properties targets. The final Q-AMOEBA model is shown to accurately reproduce both gas phase and condensed phase properties, notably improving the original AMOEBA water model. This development allows the fine study of NQEs on water liquid phase properties such as the average H-O-H angle compared to its gas phase equilibrium value, isotope effects etc... Q-AMOEBA also provides improved infrared spectroscopy prediction capabilities compared to AMOEBA03. Overall, we show that the impact of NQEs depends on the underlying model functional form and on the associated strength of hydrogen bonds. Since adQTB simulations can be performed at near classical computational cost using the Tinker-HP package, Q-AMOEBA can be extended to organic molecules, proteins and nucleic acids opening the possibility for the large scale study of the importance of NQEs in biophysics.