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Amber is a molecular dynamics (MD) software package first conceived by Peter Kollman, his lab and collaborators to simulate biomolecular systems. The pmemd module is available as a serial version for central processing units (CPUs), NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) graphics processing unit (GPU) versions as well as Message Passing Interface (MPI) parallel versions. Advanced capabilities include thermodynamic integration, replica exchange MD and accelerated MD methods. A brief update to the software and recently added capabilities is described in this Application Note. 

Atmospheric aerosols facilitate reactions between ambient gases and dissolved species. Here, we review our efforts to interrogate the uptake of these gases and the mechanisms of their reactions both theoretically and experimentally. We highlight the fascinating behavior of N2O5 in solutions ranging from pure water to complex mixtures, chosen because its aerosol-mediated reactions significantly impact global ozone, hydroxyl, and methane concentrations. As a hydrophobic, weakly soluble, and highly reactive species, N2O5 is a sensitive probe of the chemical and physical properties of aerosol interfaces. We employ contemporary theory to disentangle the fate of N2O5 as it approaches pure and salty water, starting with adsorption and ending with hydrolysis to HNO3, chlorination to ClNO2, or evaporation. Flow reactor and gas-liquid scattering experiments probe even greater complexity as added ions, organic molecules, and surfactants alter the interfacial composition and reaction rates. Together, we reveal a new perspective on multiphase chemistry in the atmosphere. 

We report the development and testing of new integrated cyberinfrastructure for performing free energy simulations with generalized hybrid quantum mechanical/molecular mechanical (QM/MM) and machine learning potentials (MLPs) in Amber. The Sander molecular dynamics program has been extended to leverage fast, density-functional tight-binding models implemented in the DFTB+ and xTB packages, and an interface to the DeePMD-kit software enables the use of MLPs. The software is integrated through application program interfaces that circumvent the need to perform “system calls” and enable the incorporation of long-range Ewald electrostatics into the external software’s self-consistent field procedure. The infrastructure provides access to QM/MM models that may serve as the foundation for QM/MM–ΔMLP potentials, which supplement the semiempirical QM/MM model with a MLP correction trained to reproduce ab initio QM/MM energies and forces. Efficient optimization of minimum free energy pathways is enabled through a new surface-accelerated finite-temperature string method implemented in the FE-ToolKit package. Furthermore, we interfaced Sander with the i-PI software by implementing the socket communication protocol used in the i-PI client–server model. The new interface with i-PI allows for the treatment of nuclear quantum effects with semiempirical QM/MM–ΔMLP models. The modular interoperable software is demonstrated on proton transfer reactions in guanine-thymine mispairs in a B-form deoxyribonucleic acid helix. The current work represents a considerable advance in the development of modular software for performing free energy simulations of chemical reactions that are important in a wide range of applications. 

Abstract The reactive uptake of N 2 O 5 to aqueous aerosol is a major loss channel for nitrogen oxides in the troposphere. Despite its importance, a quantitative picture of the uptake mechanism is missing. Here we use molecular dynamics simulations with a data-driven many-body model of coupled-cluster accuracy to quantify thermodynamics and kinetics of solvation and adsorption of N 2 O 5 in water. The free energy profile highlights that N 2 O 5 is selectively adsorbed to the liquid–vapor interface and weakly solvated. Accommodation into bulk water occurs slowly, competing with evaporation upon adsorption from gas phase. Leveraging the quantitative accuracy of the model, we parameterize and solve a reaction–diffusion equation to determine hydrolysis rates consistent with experimental observations. We find a short reaction–diffusion length, indicating that the uptake is dominated by interfacial features. The parameters deduced here, including solubility, accommodation coefficient, and hydrolysis rate, afford a foundation for which to consider the reactive loss of N 2 O 5 in more complex solutions. 

Dinitrogen pentoxide (N2O5) is an important intermediate in the atmospheric chemistry of nitrogen oxides. Although there has been much research, the processes that govern the physical interactions between N2O5 and water are still not fully understood at a molecular level. Gaining a quantitative insight from computer simulations requires going beyond the accuracy of classical force fields while accessing length scales and time scales that are out of reach for high-level quantum-chemical approaches. To this end, we present the development of MB-nrg many-body potential energy functions for nonreactive simulations of N2O5 in water. This MB-nrg model is based on electronic structure calculations at the coupled cluster level of theory and is compatible with the successful MB-pol model for water. It provides a physically correct description of long-range many-body interactions in combination with an explicit representation of up to three-body short-range interactions in terms of multidimensional permutationally invariant polynomials. In order to further investigate the importance of the underlying interactions in the model, a TTM-nrg model was also devised. TTM-nrg is a more simplistic representation that contains only two-body short-range interactions represented through Born–Mayer functions. In this work, an active learning approach was employed to efficiently build representative training sets of monomer, dimer, and trimer structures, and benchmarks are presented to determine the accuracy of our new models in comparison to a range of density functional theory methods. By assessing the binding curves, distortion energies of N2O5, and interaction energies in clusters of N2O5 and water, we evaluate the importance of two-body and three-body short-range potentials. The results demonstrate that our MB-nrg model has high accuracy with respect to the coupled cluster reference, outperforms current density functional theory models, and thus enables highly accurate simulations of N2O5 in aqueous environments.