Static dielectric constants and molecular dipole distributions of liquid water and ice-Ih investigated by the PAW-PBE exchange-correlation functional

Abstract

The static dielectric constants, ε(s), of ice-Ih and liquid water were calculated using density functional theory with the Perdew-Burke-Ernzerhof (PBE) exchange-correlation functional and the projector-augmented-wave (PAW) approach. Proton disordered ice configurations and uncorrelated liquid configurations were sampled with the electrostatic switching method using force fields specially designed to facilitate the ab initio free energy perturbation calculations. Our results indicate that PAW-PBE underestimates the ε(s) of both ice-Ih and liquid water but predicts the ratio of ice and water ε(s) in good agreement with experimental measurements. PAW-PBE gives average water dipole moments of 2.50 D in ice-Ih and 2.48 D in the liquid. Our results show that the fixed-charge water models developed by adaptive force matching can reproduce the PAW-PBE dipole moments with an error of approximately 5%. The ice and liquid models created in this work have polarizabilities of 1.32 Å(3) and 1.30 Å(3), respectively, along the HOH bisector direction.