Reorientational relaxation and rotational-translational coupling in water clusters in a d.c. external electric field

Molecular dynamics simulations have been carried out for small water clusters (N= 16, 32, 64) in a d.c. electric field at T= 200 K. It was shown that for relatively weak fields, there was a significant decrease of reorientational and structural relaxation times for all cluster sizes examined. Regarding the molecular reorientational motions, in the strong field regime, a decoupling of tumbling and spinning librations was observed. Reorientational relaxation times of the dipole and (HH) over right arrow vector joining the two hydrogen atoms were found to follow different relaxation laws, with the former decreasing and the latter increasing with electric field increase. These trends were qualitatively explained by invoking the Debye model with field-dependent friction for dipole librations and the symmetric double-well for spinning rotations on a plane perpendicular to the field axis. Finally, the interdependence of the reorientation on the translational modes of the cluster was indicated, with the translationally slow molecules being rotationally slow as well and vice versa. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.