Electron distribution, polarization

At the molecular level, the change in electron distribution (polarization) with application of an electrical field is given by... 

Induced dipole/induced dipole forces are the only intermolecular attractive forces available to nonpolar molecules such as alkanes In addition to these forces polar molecules engage m dipole-dipole and dipole/mduced dipole attractions The dipole-dipole attractive force is easiest to visualize and is illustrated m Figure 4 3 Two molecules of a polar substance experience a mutual attraction between the positively polarized region of one molecule and the negatively polarized region of the other As its name implies the dipole/induced dipole force combines features of both the induced dipole/mduced dipole and dipole-dipole attractive forces A polar region of one mole cule alters the electron distribution m a nonpolar region of another m a direction that produces an attractive force between them... 

Turning now to electrophilic aromatic substitution in (trifluoromethyl)benzene we con sider the electronic properties of a trifluoromethyl group Because of their high elec tronegativity the three fluorine atoms polarize the electron distribution m their ct bonds to carbon so that carbon bears a partial positive charge... 

H3P—CH2 where it can be seen that the electron distribution is highly polarized m the direction that makes carbon electron rich The carbon has much of the character of a car banion and can act as a nucleophile toward C=0... 

Many other measures of solvent polarity have been developed. One of the most useful is based on shifts in the absorption spectrum of a reference dye. The positions of absorption bands are, in general, sensitive to solvent polarity because the electronic distribution, and therefore the polarity, of the excited state is different from that of the ground state. The shift in the absorption maximum reflects the effect of solvent on the energy gap between the ground-state and excited-state molecules. An empirical solvent polarity measure called y(30) is based on this concept. Some values of this measure for common solvents are given in Table 4.12 along with the dielectric constants for the solvents. It can be seen that there is a rather different order of polarity given by these two quantities. 

Why do free-radical reactions involving neutral reactants and intermediates respond to substituent changes that modify electron distribution One explanation has been based on the idea that there would be some polar character in the transition state because of the electronegativity differences of the reacting atoms ... 

One area where the concept of atomic charges is deeply rooted is force field methods (Chapter 2). A significant part of the non-bonded interaction between polar molecules is described in terms of electrostatic interactions between fragments having an internal asymmetry in the electron distribution. The fundamental interaction is between the Electrostatic Potential (ESP) generated by one molecule (or fraction of) and the charged particles of another. The electrostatic potential at position r is given as a sum of contributions from the nuclei and the electronic wave function. 

Most organic compounds are electrically neutral they have no net charge, either positive or negative. We saw in Section 2.1, however, that certain bonds within a molecule, particularly the bonds in functional groups, are polar. Bond polarity is a consequence of an unsymmetrical electron distribution in a bond and is due to the difference in electronegativity of the bonded atoms. 

Polar covalent bond (Section 2.1) A covalent bond in which the electron distribution between atoms is unsymmetrical. 

The concerns we have expressed are bound to get even more acute if the problem under study demands that we are able to adequately describe distortion effects induced in the electron distribution by external fields. The evaluation of linear (and, still more, non linear) response funetions [1] by perturbation theory then forces one to take care also of the nonoccupied portion of the complete orbital spectrum, which is entrusted with the role of representing the polarization caused by the external fields in the unperturbed electron distribution [4], ... 

There are two ways of handling the interaction between the QM region and MM region one way is to calculate electrostatic QM-MM interaction with the MM method (sometimes called mechanical embedding, or ME) and the other is to include the QM-MM interaction in the QM Hamiltonian (called electronic embedding or EE). The major difference is that in the ME scheme the QM wave function is the same in the gas phase and the electrostatic interaction is included classically, while in the EE scheme the QM wave function is polarized by the MM charges. The EE scheme is substantially more expensive than ME scheme, as the SCF iteration needs to be performed until self-consistency is achieved for QM electron distribution. Although the polarization effects are called important, as we will show later,... 

---