A classical model for three-body interactions in aqueous ionic systems

We present a classical induction model to evaluate the three-body ion-water-water (I-W-W) and water-water-water (W-W-W) interactions in aqueous ionic systems. The classical description of the induction energy is based on electrostatic distributed multipoles up to hexadecapole and distributed polarizabilities up to quadrupole-quadrupole on the O and H atoms of water. The monatomic ions were described by a point charge and a dipole-dipole polarizability, while for the polyatomic ions, distributed multipoles up to hexadecapole and distributed polarizabilities up to quadrupole-quadrupole were used. The accuracy of the classical model is benchmarked against an accurate dataset of 936 (I-W-W) and 2184 (W-W-W) three-body terms for 13 different monatomic and polyatomic cation and anion systems. The classical model shows excellent agreement with the reference second order Moller-Plesset and coupled-cluster single double and perturbative triple [CCSD(T)] three-body energies. The Root-Mean-Square-Errors (RMSEs) for monatomic cations, monatomic anions, and polyatomic ions were 0.29, 0.25, and 0.12 kcal/mol, respectively. The corresponding RMSE for 1744 CCSD(T)/aVTZ three-body (W-W-W) energies, used to train MB-pol, was 0.12 kcal/mol. The accuracy of the proposed classical model demonstrates that the three-body term for aqueous ionic systems can be accurately modeled classically. This approach provides a fast, efficient, and as-accurate path toward modeling the three-body term in aqueous ionic systems that is fully transferable across systems with different ions without the need to fit to tens of thousands of ab initio calculations for each ion to extend existing many-body force fields to interactions between water and ions.