Ab-initio simulation of liquid water without artificial high temperature

Comprehending the structure and dynamics of water is crucial in various fields such as water desalination, ion separation, electrocatalysis, and biochemical processes. While reported works show that the ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) can accu- rately portray water's structure, the artificial high temperature (AHT) from 120K to 30K is needed to mimic the quantum nature of hydrogen-bond network from GGA, metaGGA to hybrid functionals. The AHT proves to be an inadequate approach for systems involving aqueous multiphase mixtures, such as water-solid interfaces and aque- ous solutions. This is due to the activation of additional phonons in other phases, which can lead to an overestimation of the dynamics for nearby water molecules. In this work, we find the regularized SCAN (rSCAN) functional can well capture both the structure and dynamics of liquid water at ambient conditions without AHT. Moreover, rSCAN can well match the experimental results of hydration structures for alkali, alkali earth and halide ions. We anticipate that the versatile and accurate rSCAN functional will emerge as a key tool based on ab-initio simulation for investigating chemical processes in aqueous environments.