Empirical bond-order potential for hydrocarbons: adaptive treatment of van der Waals interactions

Bond-order potentials provide a powerful class of models for simulating chemically reactive systems with classical potentials. In these models, the covalent bonding interactions adapt to the environment, allowing bond strength to change in response to local chemical changes. However, the non-bonded interactions should also adapt in response to chemical changes, an effect which is neglected in current bond-order potentials. Here the AIREBO potential is extended to include adaptive Lennard-Jones terms, allowing the van der Waals interactions to vary adaptively with the chemical environment. The resulting potential energy surface and its gradient remain continuous, allowing it to be used for dynamics simulations. This new potential is parameterized for hydrocarbons, and is fit to the energetics and densities of a variety of condensed phase molecular hydrocarbons. The resulting model is more accurate for modeling aromatic and other unsaturated hydrocarbon species, for which the original AIREBO potential had some deficiencies. Testing on compounds not used in the fitting procedure shows that the new model performs substantially better in predicting heats of vaporization and pressures (or densities) of condensed-phase molecular hydrocarbons.