A single-site multipole model for liquid water

Accurate and efficient empirical potential energy models that describe the atomistic interactions between water molecules in the liquid phase are essential for computer simulations of many problems in physics, chemistry, and biology, especially when long length or time scales are important. However, while models with non-polarizable partial charges at four or five sites in a water molecule give remarkably good values for certain properties, deficiencies have been noted in other properties and increasing the number of sites decreases computational efficiency. An alternate approach is to utilize a multipole expansion of the electrostatic potential due to the molecular charge distribution, which is exact outside the charge distribution in the limits of infinite distances or infinite orders of multipoles while partial charges are a qualitative representation of electron density as point charges. Here, a single-site multipole model of water is presented, which is as fast computationally as three-site models bu...