Bridging Gaussian Density Fluctuations from Microscopic to Macroscopic Volumes: Applications to Non-Polar Solute Hydration Thermodynamics

[Image: see text] The hydration of hydrophobic solutes is intimately related to the spontaneous formation of cavities in water through ambient density fluctuations. Information theory-based modeling and simulations have shown that water density fluctuations in small volumes are approximately Gaussian. For limiting cases of microscopic and macroscopic volumes, water density fluctuations are known exactly and are rigorously related to the density and isothermal compressibility of water. Here, we develop a theory—interpolated gaussian fluctuation theory (IGFT)—that builds an analytical bridge to describe water density fluctuations from microscopic to molecular scales. This theory requires no detailed information about the water structure beyond the effective size of a water molecule and quantities that are readily obtained from water’s equation-of-state—namely, the density and compressibility. Using simulations, we show that IGFT provides a good description of density fluctuations near the mean, that is, it characterizes the variance of occupancy fluctuations over all solute sizes. Moreover, when combined with the information theory, IGFT reproduces the well-known signatures of hydrophobic hydration, such as entropy convergence and solubility minima, for atomic-scale solutes smaller than the crossover length scale beyond which the Gaussian assumption breaks down. We further show that near hydrophobic and hydrophilic self-assembled monolayer surfaces in contact with water, the normalized solvent density fluctuations within observation volumes depend similarly on size as observed in the bulk, suggesting the feasibility of a modified version of IGFT for interfacial systems. Our work highlights the utility of a density fluctuation-based approach toward understanding and quantifying the solvation of non-polar solutes in water and the forces that drive them toward surfaces with different hydrophobicities.