Are all-atom any better than united-atom force fields for the description of liquid properties of alkanes?

Alkanes are a fundamental part in empirical force fields (FF) not only due to their technological relevance, but also due to the prevalence of alkane moieties in organic molecules, e.g., compounds containing a saturated carbon chain. Therefore, a good description of alkane interactions is crucial for determining the quality of a FF. In this study, the performance of 12 empirical force fields (FF) was evaluated in the context of reproducing liquid properties of alkanes. More specifically, n-octane was chosen as a reference compound since it is a liquid in a broad temperature range and it has numerous experimental data for thermodynamic, transport, and structural properties, as well as for their temperature dependencies. A normalized root-mean-square deviation (NRMSD) analysis was used to rank the force fields in their ability to reproduce the experimental data. Five out of the six best force fields considered were united-atom models. The GROMOS force field showed the smallest deviation in terms of NRMSD, followed by TRAPPE-EH, NERD, CHARMM-UA, TRAPPE-UA, and OPLS-UA. This overall better performance of the united-atom force fields indicates that complexity does not always bring quality.

Temperature of critical clusters in nucleation theory: generalized Gibbs' approach

According to the classical Gibbs' approach to the description of thermodynamically heterogeneous systems, the temperature of the critical clusters in nucleation is the same as the temperature of the ambient phase, i.e., with respect to temperature the conventional macroscopic equilibrium conditions are assumed to be fulfilled. In contrast, the generalized Gibbs' approach [J. W. P. Schmelzer, G. Sh. Boltachev, and V. G. Baidakov, J. Chem. Phys. 119, 6166 (2003); and ibid. 124, 194503 (2006)] predicts that critical clusters (having commonly spatial dimensions in the nanometer range) have, as a rule, a different temperature as compared with the ambient phase. The existence of a curved interface may lead, consequently, to an equilibrium coexistence of different phases with different temperatures similar to differences in pressure as expressed by the well-known Laplace equation. Employing the generalized Gibbs' approach, it is demonstrated that, for the case of formation of droplets in a one-component vapor, the temperature of the critical droplets can be shown to be higher as compared to the vapor. In this way, temperature differences between critically sized droplets and ambient vapor phase, observed in recent molecular dynamics simulations of argon condensation by Wedekind et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 127, 064501 (2007)], can be given a straightforward theoretical interpretation. It is shown as well that - employing the same model assumptions concerning bulk and interfacial properties of the system under consideration - the temperature of critical bubbles in boiling is lower as compared to the bulk liquid.