Molecular Modeling of Crystalline Oligothiophenes: Testing and Development of Improved Force Fields

Abstract

We present the results of an extensive test of different force field models for crystalline oligothiophenes. The models are mostly based on MM3 for intramolecular degrees of freedom, but they rely on ab initio calculations for the inter-ring torsion potential and the molecular charge distribution. The latter is represented using either point charges from a fit of the molecular electrostatic potential or atomic charges, dipoles, and quadrupoles from a distributed multipole analysis. The force fields are tested by comparing the experimental structures with static energy minimizations and, in a few cases, room-temperature molecular dynamics simulations, also. We find that the point-charge model yields satisfactory results for most systems, including α-tetrathiophene, α-sexithiophene, tetrahexylsexithiophene, and bis(dithienothiophene). However, α-perfluorosexithiophene represents one difficult case where the distributed multipole model turns out to be clearly superior. Finally, we find that it is necessary to rescale the MM3 van der Waals parameters when these are employed in molecular dynamics simulations to reproduce the correct crystal densities.