Can TIP4P water be used with fix electrode/conp and pppm/electrode?

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Hello,

Before reporting this as a bug, I would like to understand whether this combination is currently supported by design.

I am using the latest LAMMPS (4Jul2026) together with the ELECTRODE package to simulate a constant-potential supercapacitor.

My system consists of:

  • Carbon electrodes

  • fix electrode/conp

  • kspace_style pppm/electrode

  • pair_style lj/cut/tip4p/long

  • TIP4P water

  • Na⁺ and ClO₄⁻ ions

The simulation aborts immediately with

ERROR: Fix electrode couldn’t find a Coulombic pair style

Before posting here, I searched the documentation, GitHub issues, and previous discussions on the Materials Science Community, but I could not find any discussion specifically about combining the ELECTRODE package with TIP4P water models.

I also spent some time inspecting the source code to better understand the issue. From what I observed:

  • pppm/tip4p contains the TIP4P-specific charge mapping required for the virtual M-site.

  • pppm/electrode implements the ElectrodeKSpace interface required by the ELECTRODE package.

  • However, I could not find a KSpace style that combines both capabilities.

This made me wonder whether this combination is currently unsupported, or whether I am simply missing the correct way to set it up.

So my questions are:

  1. Is TIP4P currently supported together with fix electrode/conp?

  2. If not, is this due to a fundamental algorithmic limitation, or is it simply an unimplemented feature?

  3. Would a combined implementation (e.g. a TIP4P-aware pppm/electrode) be the intended direction for adding such support?

I would appreciate any clarification from the developers. If this functionality is simply not implemented yet, I would also be interested in contributing to such an implementation.

Thank you very much.

It is not implemented. You should contact the developers of the ELECTRODE package about contributing/collaborating.

Thank you for the clarification.

That answers my question and confirms what I was observing while looking through the source code.

I’ll continue with an SPC/E model for now and may contact the ELECTRODE developers regarding potential TIP4P support in the future.

Thanks again!