Electrostatically Embedded Many-Body Approximation for Systems of Water, Ammonia, and Sulfuric Acid and the Dependence of Its Performance on Embedding Charges

This work tests the capability of the electrostatically embedded many-body (EE-MB) method to calculate accurate (relative to conventional calculations carried out at the same level of electronic structure theory and with the same basis set) binding energies of mixed clusters (as large as 9-mers) consisting of water, ammonia, sulfuric acid, and ammonium and bisulfate ions. This work also investigates the dependence of the accuracy of the EE-MB approximation on the type and origin of the charges used for electrostatically embedding these clusters. The conclusions reached are that for all of the clusters and sets of embedding charges studied in this work, the electrostatically embedded three-body (EE-3B) approximation is capable of consistently yielding relative errors of less than 1% and an average relative absolute error of only 0.3%, and that the performance of the EE-MB approximation does not depend strongly on the specific set of embedding charges used. The electrostatically embedded pairwise approximation has errors about an order of magnitude larger than EE-3B. This study also explores the question of why the accuracy of the EE-MB approximation shows such little dependence on the types of embedding charges employed.