Hydrogen bonding at the diatomics-in-molecules level: Water clusters

Further developments of the intermolecular diatomics-in-molecules (DIM) theory towards construction of potential energy surfaces of hydrogen-bonded molecular aggregates are presented. Compared to the previously studied hydrogen fluoride clusters (HF)n [J. Chem. Phys. 111, 4442 (1999)], considerably more complicated and challenging systems, namely, water clusters (H2O)n (n=2–6) have been analyzed in this work. The present DIM, or more precisely, diatomics-in-ionic-systems, scheme is based on the balanced treatment of neutral and ionic contributions to the electronic properties of polyatomic species, and in this case takes into account the mixing of the OH and O−H+ electronic states within the valence bond description of water molecules. The potential curves of diatomic molecules required for the present application, including ionic species O−H, OH+, O2−, have been computed by ab initio quantum chemistry tools. The results of DIM calculations of equilibrium geometry configurations, binding energies, and relative energies for the low-lying isomers of (H2O)n (n=2–6) are compared to the reference data showing a good predictive power of this method.