Diabatic free energy curves and coordination fluctuations for the aqueous Ag+∕Ag2+ redox couple: A biased Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics investigation

Biased Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics simulations are performed to compute redox potential and free energy curves for the redox half reaction Ag+→Ag2++e− in aqueous solution. The potential energy surfaces of reactant and product state are linearly coupled and the system transferred from the reduced state to the oxidized state by variation of the coupling parameter from 0 to 1. The redox potential is obtained by thermodynamic integration of the average ionization energy of Ag+. Diabatic free energy curves of reduced (R) and oxidized (O) states are obtained to good statistical accuracy by reweighting and combining the set of biased distributions of the ionization energy. The diabatic free energy curves of Ag+ and Ag2+ are parabolic over a wide range of the reaction coordinate in agreement with the linear response assumption that underlies Marcus theory. However, we observe deviations from parabolic behavior in the equilibrium region of Ag+ and find different values for the reorganization free energy of R (1.4 eV) and O (0.9 eV). The computed reorganization free energy of Ag2+ is in good agreement with the experimental estimate of 0.9–1.2 eV obtained from photoelectron spectroscopy. As suggested by our calculations, the moderate deviation from linear response behavior found for Ag+ is likely related to the highly fluxional solvation shell of this ion, which exhibits water exchange reactions on the picosecond time scale of the present molecular dynamics simulation.