We compute the interlayer bonding properties of graphite using an ab initio many-body theory. We carry out variational and diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations and find an equilibrium interlayer binding energy in good agreement with most recent experiments. We also analyze the behavior of the total energy as a function of interlayer separation at large distances comparing the results with the predictions of the random phase approximation.

Water is a major component of fluids in the Earth's mantle, where its properties are substantially different from those at ambient conditions. At the pressures and temperatures of the mantle, experiments on aqueous fluids are challenging, and several fundamental properties of water are poorly known; e.g., its dielectric constant has not been measured. This lack of knowledge of water dielectric properties greatly limits our ability to model water-rock interactions and, in general, our understanding of aqueous fluids below the Earth's crust. Using ab initio molecular dynamics, we computed the dielectric constant of water under the conditions of the Earth's upper mantle, and we predicted the solubility products of carbonate minerals. We found that MgCO 3 (magnesite)-insoluble in water under ambient conditions-becomes at least slightly soluble at the bottom of the upper mantle, suggesting that water may transport significant quantities of oxidized carbon. Our results suggest that aqueous carbonates could leave the subducting lithosphere during dehydration reactions and could be injected into the overlying lithosphere. The Earth's deep carbon could possibly be recycled through aqueous transport on a large scale through subduction zones.water solvation properties | carbon cycle | ab initio simulations | supercritical water W ater, a major component of fluids in the Earth's mantle (1, 2), is expected to play a substantial role in hydrothermal reactions occurring in the deep Earth at supercritical conditions (3, 4). Pressure (P) and temperature (T) increase with increasing depth (5) and at ∼400 km, where seismic discontinuities define the bottom boundary of the upper mantle, the pressure can reach ∼13 GPa and the temperature can be as high as 1,700 K (6-8). In this regime the properties of water and thus of aqueous fluids are remarkably different from those at ambient conditions. For example, water has an unusually large static dielectric constant e 0 ∼ 78 at ambient conditions; however, at the vapor-liquid critical point at 647 K, e 0 deceases to less than 10 (9), implying that ionwater interactions in solution are greatly modified. In turn these changes affect the solubility of minerals and hence chemical reactions occurring in aqueous solutions under pressure (10, 11).Measurements of the dielectric constant of water date back to the 1890s (12), but they are still limited to P < 0.5 GPa and T < 900 K, corresponding to crustal metamorphic conditions. Indeed, it is challenging to measure e 0 at high P and T because water becomes highly corrosive (11). Several models correlating experimental data suggested extrapolations of e 0 to ∼1 GPa and ∼1,300 K (e.g., refs. 13-15), which corresponds to only very shallow mantle conditions under the oceans; however, deeper mantle conditions relevant to plate tectonic processes could not be reached and different extrapolations showed poor agreement with each other (1). The current lack of knowledge of the dielectric constant of water under the P and T of the mantle hampers our ability...

We report the first ab initio simulations of the Raman spectra of liquid water, obtained by combining first principles molecular dynamics and density functional perturbation theory. Our computed spectra are in good agreement with experiments, especially in the low frequency region. We also describe a systematic strategy to analyze the Raman intensities, which is of general applicability to molecular solids and liquids, and it is based on maximally localized Wannier functions and effective molecular polarizabilities. Our analysis revealed the presence of intermolecular charge fluctuations accompanying the hydrogen bond (HB) stretching modes at 270 cm(-1), in spite of the absence of any Raman activity in the isotropic spectrum. We also found that charge fluctuations partly contribute to the 200 cm(-1) peak in the anisotropic spectrum, thus providing insight into the controversial origin of such peak. Our results highlighted the importance of taking into account electronic effects in interpreting the Raman spectra of liquid water and the key role of charge fluctuations within the HB network; they also pointed at the inaccuracies of models using constant molecular polarizabilities to describe the Raman response of liquid water.

We present a Quantum Monte Carlo study of the dissociation energy and the dispersion curve of the water dimer, a prototype of hydrogen bonded system. Our calculations are based on a wave function which is a modern and fully correlated implementation of the Pauling's valence bond idea: the Jastrow Antisymmetrised Geminal Power (JAGP) [Casula et al. J. Chem. Phys. 2003, 119, 6500-6511]. With this variational wave function we obtain a binding energy of -4.5(0.1) kcal/mol that is only slightly increased to -4.9(0.1) kcal/mol by using the Lattice Regularized Diffusion Monte Carlo (LRDMC). This projection technique allows for the substantial improvement in the correlation energy of a given variational guess and indeed, when applied to the JAGP, yields a binding energy in fair agreement with the value of -5.0 kcal/mol reported by experiments and other theoretical works. The minimum position, the curvature, and the asymptotic behavior of the dispersion curve are well reproduced both at the variational and the LRDMC level. Moreover, thanks to the simplicity and the accuracy of our variational approach, we are able to dissect the various contributions to the binding energy of the water dimer in a systematic and controlled way. This is achieved by appropriately switching off determinantal and Jastrow variational terms in the JAGP. Within this scheme, we estimate that the dispersive van der Waals contribution to the electron correlation is substantial and amounts to 1.5(0.2) kcal/mol, this value being comparable with the intermolecular covalent energy that we find to be 1.1(0.2) kcal/mol. The present Quantum Monte Carlo approach based on the JAGP wave function is revealed as a promising tool for the interpretation and the quantitative description of weakly interacting systems, where both dispersive and covalent energy contributions play an important role.