Which Physical Phenomena Determine the Ionization Potential of Liquid Water?

Understanding and predicting the properties of molecular liquids from the corresponding properties of the individual molecules is notoriously difficult because there is cooperative behavior among the molecules in the liquid. This is particularly relevant for water, where even the most fundamental molecular properties, such as the dipole moment, are radically different in the liquid compared to the gas phase. In this work, we focus on the ionization potential (IP) of liquid water by dissecting its individual contributions from the individual molecules making up the liquid. This is achieved by using periodic subsystem DFT, a state-of-the-art electronic structure method based on density embedding. We identify and evaluate four important electronic contributions to the IP of water: (1) mean-field, evaluated at the Hartree–Fock level; (2) electronic correlation, incorporated via DFT and wave function-based methods; (3) interaction with and (4) polarization of the environment, both evaluated ab initio with density embedding. Furthermore, we analyze their impact on the IP relative to the structural fluctuation of liquid water, revealing unexpected, hidden correlations, confirming that the broadening of the photoelectron spectra is mostly caused by intermolecular interactions confined in the first solvation shell.