Development of a “First Principles” Water Potential with Flexible Monomers: Dimer Potential Energy Surface, VRT Spectrum, and Second Virial Coefficient

The development of a “first principles” water potential with flexible monomers (MB-pol) for molecular simulations of water systems from gas to condensed phases is described. MB-pol is built upon the many-body expansion of the intermolecular interactions, and the specific focus of this study is on the two-body term (V2B) representing the full-dimensional intermolecular part of the water dimer potential energy surface. V2B is constructed by fitting 40,000 dimer energies calculated at the CCSD­(T)/CBS level of theory and imposing the correct asymptotic behavior at long-range as predicted from “first principles”. The comparison of the calculated vibration–rotation tunneling (VRT) spectrum and second virial coefficient with the corresponding experimental results demonstrates the accuracy of the MB-pol dimer potential energy surface.