Interplay of local hydrogen-bonding and long-ranged dipolar forces in simulations of confined water

Spherical truncations of Coulomb interactions in standard models for water permit efficient molecular simulations and can give remarkably accurate results for the structure of the uniform liquid. However, truncations are known to produce significant errors in nonuniform systems, particularly for electrostatic properties. Local molecular field (LMF) theory corrects such truncations by use of an effective or restructured electrostatic potential that accounts for effects of the remaining long-ranged interactions through a density-weighted mean field average and satisfies a modified Poisson's equation defined with a Gaussian-smoothed charge density. We apply LMF theory to 3 simple molecular systems that exhibit different aspects of the failure of a naïive application of spherical truncations—water confined between hydrophobic walls, water confined between atomically corrugated hydrophilic walls, and water confined between hydrophobic walls with an applied electric field. Spherical truncations of 1/r fail spectacularly for the final system, in particular, and LMF theory corrects the failings for all three. Further, LMF theory provides a more intuitive way to understand the balance between local hydrogen bonding and longer-ranged electrostatics in molecular simulations involving water.