Effects of a More Accurate Polarizable Hamiltonian on Polymorph Free Energies Computed Efficiently by Reweighting...

We examine the free energies of three benzene polymorphs as a function of temperature in the point-charge OPLS-AA and GROMOS54A7 potentials as well as the polarizable AMOEBA09 potential. For this system, using a polarizable Hamiltonian instead of the cheaper point-charge potentials is shown to have a significantly smaller effect on the stability at 250 K than on the lattice energy at 0 K. The benzene I polymorph is found to be the most stable crystal structure in all three potentials examined and at all temperatures examined. For each potential, we report the free energies over a range of temperatures and discuss the added value of using full free energy methods over the minimized lattice energy to determine the relative crystal stability at finite temperatures. The free energies in the polarizable Hamiltonian are efficiently calculated using samples collected in a cheaper point-charge potential. The polarizable free energies are estimated from the point-charge trajectories using Boltzmann reweighting with MBAR. The high configuration-space overlap necessary for efficient Boltzmann reweighting is achieved by designing point-charge potentials with intramolecular parameters matching those in the expensive polarizable Hamiltonian. Finally, we compare the computational cost of this indirect reweighted free energy estimate to the cost of simulating directly in the expensive polarizable Hamiltonian.