UC Davis

In adaptive resolution simulations the same system is concurrently modeled with different resolution in different subdomains of the simulation box, thereby enabling an accurate description in a small but relevant region, while the rest is treated with a computationally parsimonious model. In this framework, electrostatic interaction, whose accurate treatment is a crucial aspect in the realistic modeling of soft matter and biological systems, represents a particularly acute problem due to the intrinsic long-range nature of Coulomb potential. In the present work we propose and validate the usage of a short-range modification of Coulomb potential, the Damped shifted force (DSF) model, in the context of the Hamiltonian adaptive resolution simulation (H-AdResS) scheme. This approach, which is here validated on bulk water, ensures a reliable reproduction of the structural and dynamical properties of the liquid, and enables a seamless embedding in the H-AdResS framework. The resulting dual-resolution setup is implemented in the LAMMPS simulation package, and its customized version employed in the present work is made publicly available.