Liquid chloroform structure from computer simulation with a full ab initio intermolecular interaction potential.

We have calculated the intermolecular interaction energies of the chloroform dimer in 12 orientations using the second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory. Single point energies of important geometries were calibrated by the coupled cluster with single and double and perturbative triple excitation method. Dunning's correlation consistent basis sets up to aug-cc-pVQZ have been employed in extrapolating the interaction energies to the complete basis set limit values. With the ab initio potential data we constructed a 5-site force field model for molecular dynamics simulations. We compared the simulation results with recent experiments and obtained quantitative agreements for the detailed atomwise radial distribution functions. Our results were also consistent with previous results using empirical force fields with polarization effects. Moreover, the calculated diffusion coefficients reproduced the experimental data over a wide range of thermodynamic conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ab initio force field which is capable of competing with existing empirical force fields for liquid chloroform.