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details about vdw interactions

Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2022 11:43 am
by dkonstan
Hi OpenMM,

I am building an MD engine for a specific project that is difficult to do with standard MD software. I was wondering two things:

1. in the xml files of OpenMM force fields, what are the units of epsilon and sigma in the vdw sections?
2. for vdw interactions, how do you combine the sigmas and epsilons of two interacting atoms to create the VDW potential between them? I know there is a standard way to do this but I want to know the exact OpenMM way so I will use the sigma and epsilon parameters correctly.

Thank you!

Re: details about vdw interactions

Posted: Fri Nov 11, 2022 1:54 pm
by peastman
See the documentation at http://docs.openmm.org/latest/userguide ... html#units and http://docs.openmm.org/latest/userguide ... ondedforce. Sigma is in nm and epsilon is in kJ/mol. It uses Lorentz-Berthelot combining rules.

Re: details about vdw interactions

Posted: Sat Nov 12, 2022 9:50 pm
by dkonstan
thanks!