Given the piecewise approach to modeling intermolecular interactions for
force fields, they can be difficult to parameterize since they are fit to data
like total energies that only indirectly connect to their separable functional
forms. Furthermore, by neglecting certain types of molecular interactions such
as charge penetration and charge transfer, most classical force fields must
rely on, but do not always demonstrate, how cancellation of errors occurs among
the remaining molecular interactions accounted for such as exchange repulsion,
electrostatics, and polarization. In this work we present the first generation
of the (many-body) MB-UCB force field that explicitly accounts for the
decomposed molecular interactions commensurate with a variational energy
decomposition analysis, including charge transfer, with force field design
choices that reduce the computational expense of the MB-UCB potential while
remaining accurate. We optimize parameters using only single water molecule and
water cluster data up through pentamers, with no fitting to condensed phase
data, and we demonstrate that high accuracy is maintained when the force field
is subsequently validated against conformational energies of larger water
cluster data sets, radial distribution functions of the liquid phase, and the
temperature dependence of thermodynamic and transport water properties. We
conclude that MB-UCB is comparable in performance to MB-Pol, but is less
expensive and more transferable by eliminating the need to represent
short-ranged interactions through large parameter fits to high order
polynomials
