UC Davis

The electric field created by a condensed-phase environment is a powerful and convenient descriptor for intermolecular interactions. Not only does it provide a unifying language to compare many different types of interactions, but it also possesses clear connections to experimental observables, such as vibrational Stark effects. We calculate here the electric fields experienced by a vibrational chromophore (the carbonyl group of acetophenone) in an array of solvents of diverse polarities using molecular dynamics simulations with the AMOEBA polarizable force field. The mean and variance of the calculated electric fields correlate well with solvent-induced frequency shifts and band broadening, suggesting Stark effects as the underlying mechanism of these key solution-phase spectral effects. Compared to fixed-charge and continuum models, AMOEBA was the only model examined that could describe nonpolar, polar, and hydrogen bonding environments in a consistent fashion. Nevertheless, we found that fixed-charge force fields and continuum models were able to replicate some results of the polarizable simulations accurately, allowing us to clearly identify which properties and situations require explicit polarization and/or atomistic representations to be modeled properly, and to identify for which properties and situations simpler models are sufficient. We also discuss the ramifications of these results for modeling electrostatics in complex environments, such as proteins.