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Redox potentials and acidity constants from density functional theory based molecular dynamics.


Type

Article

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Authors

Cheng, Jun 
Liu, Xiandong 
VandeVondele, Joost 
Sulpizi, Marialore 

Abstract

CONSPECTUS: All-atom methods treat solute and solvent at the same level of electronic structure theory and statistical mechanics. All-atom computation of acidity constants (pKa) and redox potentials is still a challenge. In this Account, we review such a method combining density functional theory based molecular dynamics (DFTMD) and free energy perturbation (FEP) methods. The key computational tool is a FEP based method for reversible insertion of a proton or electron in a periodic DFTMD model system. The free energy of insertion (work function) is computed by thermodynamic integration of vertical energy gaps obtained from total energy differences. The problem of the loss of a physical reference for ionization energies under periodic boundary conditions is solved by comparing with the proton work function computed for the same supercell. The scheme acts as a computational hydrogen electrode, and the DFTMD redox energies can be directly compared with experimental redox potentials. Consistent with the closed shell nature of acid dissociation, pKa estimates computed using the proton insertion/removal scheme are found to be significantly more accurate than the redox potential calculations. This enables us to separate the DFT error from other sources of uncertainty such as finite system size and sampling errors. Drawing an analogy with charged defects in solids, we trace the error in redox potentials back to underestimation of the energy gap of the extended states of the solvent. Accordingly the improvement in the redox potential as calculated by hybrid functionals is explained as a consequence of the opening up of the bandgap by the Hartree-Fock exchange component in hybrids. Test calculations for a number of small inorganic and organic molecules show that the hybrid functional implementation of our method can reproduce acidity constants with an uncertainty of 1-2 pKa units (0.1 eV). The error for redox potentials is in the order of 0.2 V.

Description

Keywords

0307 Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, Bioengineering

Journal Title

Acc Chem Res

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0001-4842
1520-4898

Volume Title

47

Publisher

American Chemical Society (ACS)
Sponsorship
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/K014560/1)
J. C. thanks Emmanuel College at Cambridge for research fellowship. Dr. Aron Cohen is ackowledged for helpful discussions about density functionals and the delocalization er- ror. X.-D. L. thanks National Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41273074 and 41222015), the Foundation for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of PR China (No. 201228) and Newton International Fellow Program for nancial support. We thank HECToR and UKCP consortium for computing time.