Basis sets molecular system simulations

However, theories that are based on a basis set expansion do have a serious limitation with respect to the number of electrons. Even if one considers the rapid development of computer technology, it will be virtually impossible to treat by the MO method a small system of a size typical of classical molecular simulation, say 1000 water molecules. A logical solution to such a problem would be to employ a hybrid approach in which a chemical species of interest is handled by quantum chemistry while the solvent is treated classically. 

The second approach used in first-principles tribological simulations focuses on the behavior of the sheared fluid. That is, the walls are not considered and the system is treated as bulk fluid, as discussed. These simulations are typically performed using ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) with DFT and plane-wave basis sets. A general tribological AIMD simulation would be run as follows. A system representing the fluid would be placed in a simulation cell repeated periodically in all three directions. Shear or load is applied to the system using schemes such as that of Parrinello and Rahman, which was discussed above. In this approach, one defines a (potentially time-dependent) reference stress tensor aref and alters the nuclear and cell dynamics, such that the internal stress tensor crsys is equal to aref. When crsys = aref, the internal and external forces on the cell vectors balance, and the system is subject to the desired shear or load. 

In order to overcome the limitations of currently available empirical force field param-eterizations, we performed Car-Parrinello (CP) Molecular Dynamic simulations [36]. In the framework of DFT, the Car-Parrinello method is well recognized as a powerful tool to investigate the dynamical behaviour of chemical systems. This method is based on an extended Lagrangian MD scheme, where the potential energy surface is evaluated at the DFT level and both the electronic and nuclear degrees of freedom are propagated as dynamical variables. Moreover, the implementation of such MD scheme with localized basis sets for expanding the electronic wavefunctions has provided the chance to perform effective and reliable simulations of liquid systems with more accurate hybrid density functionals and nonperiodic boundary conditions [37]. Here we present the results of the CPMD/QM/PCM approach for the three nitroxide derivatives sketched above details on computational parameters can be found in specific papers [13]. 

Car and Parrinello in their celebrated 1985 paper [2] proposed an alternative route for molecular simulations of electrons and nuclei altogether, in the framework of density functional theory. Their idea was to reintroduce the expansion coefficients Cj(G) of the Kohn-Sham orbitals in the plane wave basis set, with respect to which the Kohn-Sham energy functional should be minimized, as degrees of freedom of the system. They then proposed an extended Car-Parrinello Lagrangian for the system, which has dependance on the fictitious degrees of freedom Cj(G) and their time derivative Cj (G) ... 

Beyond a certain system size, even DFT methods using conventional basis sets become computationally very intensive. In such situations, one has to take recourse to the use of solid-state physics methods like the pseudopotential plane wave or tight-binding methods [28,29]. As the systems become larger, Monte Carlo (MC) simulations and molecular dynamics simulations based on effective pair potentials (including two-body to multi-body interactions) are carried out. 

The MP2 method has been found to accurately describe the energetics of water clusters, providing that sufficiently flexible atomic basis sets are employed [5,11,20, 67,68]. However, whUe MP2 calculations are feasible for clusters containing up to 30 or so water molecules, the steep 0 N )) computational scaling of conventional MP2 calculations with system size precludes their use in carrying out Monte Carlo or molecular dynamics simulations of water clusters containing six or more monomers. 

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