Study of Dispersion Forces with Quantum Monte Carlo: Toward a Continuum Model for Solvation

We present a general method to compute dispersion interaction energy that, starting from London's interpretation, is based on the measure of the electronic electric field fluctuations, evaluated on electronic sampled configurations generated by quantum Monte Carlo. A damped electric field was considered in order to avoid divergence in the variance. Dispersion atom atom C-6 van der Waals coefficients were computed by coupling electric field fluctuations with static dipole polarizabilities. The dipole polarizability was evaluated at the diffusion Monte Carlo level by studying the response of the system to a constant external electric field. We extended the method to the calculation of the dispersion contribution to the free energy of solvation in the framework of the polarizable continuum model. We performed test calculations on pairs of some atomic systems. We considered He in ground and low lying excited states and Ne in the ground state and obtained a good agreement with literature data. We also made calculations on He, Ne, and F- in water as the solvent. Resulting dispersion contribution to the free energy of solvation shows the reliability of the method illustrated here.