Water structure as a function of temperature from X-ray scattering experiments and ab initio molecular dynamics

Abstract

We present high-quality X-ray scattering experiments on pure water taken over a temperature range of 2 to 77 °C using a synchrotron beam line at the advanced light source (ALS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The ALS X-ray scattering intensities are qualitatively different in trend of maximum intensity over this temperature range compared to older X-ray experiments. While the common procedure is to report both the intensity curve and radial distribution function(s), the proper extraction of the real-space pair correlation functions from the experimental scattering is very difficult due to uncertainty introduced in the experimental corrections, the proper weighting of OO, OH, and HH contributions, and numerical problems of Fourier transforming truncated data in Q-space. Instead, we consider the direct calculation of X-ray scattering spectra using electron densities derived from density functional theory based on real-space configurations generated with classical water models. The simulation of the experimental intensity is therefore definitive for determining radial distribution functions over a smaller Q-range. We find that the TIP4P, TIP5P and polarizable TIP4P-Pol2 water models, with DFT-LDA densities, show very good agreement with the experimental intensities, and TIP4P-Pol2 in particular shows quantitative agreement over the full temperature range. The resulting radial distribution functions from TIP4P-Pol2 provide the current best benchmarks for real-space water structure over the biologically relevant temperature range studied here.