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. SMK was supported in part by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences; JLS and IJF were supported by the IMPACT scheme at University College London (UCL). We acknowledge the UCL Legion High Performance Computing Facility, and associated support services together with the resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02- 05CH11231. JLS thanks Dr. Gregory Schenter, Dr. Theo Kurtén and Prof. Hanna Vehkamäki for important guidance and discussions.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1243213
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-112760; KC0301050
- Journal Information:
- Molecular Physics, Journal Name: Molecular Physics Journal Issue: 2 Vol. 114; ISSN 0026-8976
- Publisher:
- Taylor & Francis
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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