Transferability of Buckingham Parameters for Short-range Repulsion between Topological Atoms

The repulsive part of the Buckingham potential, with parameters A and B, can be used to model deformation energies and steric energies. Both are calculated using the interacting quantum atoms energy decomposition scheme where the latter is obtained from the former by a charge-transfer-based energy correction. These energies relate to short-range interactions, specifically deformation of electron density and steric hindrance, respectively, when topological atoms approach each other. In this work, we calculate and fit the energies of carbonyl carbon, carbonyl oxygen and, where possible, amine nitrogen atoms to the repulsive part of the Buckingham potential for 26 molecules. We find that while the steric energies of all atom pairs studied display exponential behaviour with respect to distance, some deformation energy data do not. The obtained parameters are shown to be transferable by calculating root-mean-square errors of fitted potentials with respect to energy data of the same atom in, as far as possible, all other molecules from our dataset. We observed that 36 % and 10 % of these errors were smaller than 4 kJ mol-1 for steric and deformation energy, respectively. Thus, we find that steric energy parameters are more transferable than deformation energy parameters. Finally, we speculate on the physical meaning of the A and B parameters and the implications of the strong exponential and exponential-linear piecewise relationships that we observe between them.