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Updated: Jul 18, 2026

Computation of Atmospheric Concentrations of Molecular Clusters from ab initio Thermochemistry
Published on: April 8, 2020
Low-lying isomers and finite temperature behavior of (H2O)6 -
Thomas Sommerfeld1, Suzanne D Gardner, Albert DeFusco
1Department of Chemistry and Center for Molecular and Materials Simulation, University of Pittsburgh, Chevron Science Center, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. tsom@pitt.edu
Abstract:
(H2O)(6) (-) appears as a "magic" number water cluster in (H2O)(n) (-) mass spectra. The structure of the (H2O)(6) (-) isomer dominating the experimental population has been established only recently [N. I. Hammer et al., J. Phys. Chem. A 109, 7896 (2005)], and the most noteworthy characteristic of this isomer is the localization of the excess electron in the vicinity of a double-acceptor monomer. In the present work, we use a quantum Drude model to characterize the low-energy isomers and the finite temperature properties of (H2O)(6) (-). Comparison with ab initio calculations shows that the use of a water model employing distributed polarizabilities and distributed repulsive sites is necessary to correctly reproduce the energy ordering of the low-lying isomers. Both the simulations and the ab initio calculations predict that there are several isomers of (H2O)(6) (-) significantly lower in energy than the experimentally observed species, suggesting that the experimental distribution is far from equilibrium.
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