Damping functions in polarizable force fields

The development of the methods described in Section 9.2 was an important step in modeling polarization because it led to accurate calculations of molecular polarizability tensors. The most serious issue with those methods is known as the polarization catastrophe since they are unable to reproduce the substantial decrease of the total dipole moment at distances close to contact as obtained from ab initio calculations. As noted by Applequist et al. [49], and Thole [50], a property of the unmodified point dipole is that it may originate infinite polarization by the cooperative interaction of the two induced dipoles in the direction of the line connecting the two. The mathematical origins of such singularities are made more evident by considering a simple system consisting of two atoms (A and B) with isotropic polarizabilities, aA and c b. The molecular polarizability, has two components, one parallel and one perpendicular to the bond axis between A and B, 

When the distance r between the two points approaches 4(aAaB)l/6, the parallel component an goes to infinity and will be negative for shorter distances. 

The singularities can be avoided by making the polarizabilities sufficiently small so that at the typical distances between the atoms ( 1 A) the factor 4aAais/r6 is always less than one. The Applequist polarizabilities are in fact small compared to ab 

While nonbonded atom pairs will typically not come within 1A of each other, it is possible for covalently bound pairs, either directly bounds, as in 1-2 pairs, or at the vertices of an angle, as in 1-3 pairs. Accordingly it may be considered desirable to omit the 1-2 and 1-3 dipole-dipole interactions as is commonly performed on additive force fields for the Coulombic and van der Waals terms. However, it has been shown that inclusion of the 1-2 and 1-3 dipole-dipole interactions is required to achieve anistropic molecular polarizabilites when using isotropic atomic polariz-abilites [50], For example, in a Drude model of benzene in which isotropic polarization was included on the carbons only inclusion of the 1-2 and 1-3 dipole-dipole interactions along with the appropriate damping of those interactions allowed for reproduction of the anisotropic molecular polarizability of the molecule [64], Thus, it may be considered desirable to include these short range interactions in a polarizable force field. 

The method of Thole was developed with the help of the induced dipole formulation, when all dipoles interact through the dipole field tensor. The modification introduced by Thole consisted in changing the dipole field tensor  

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