Chemical bond effects in classical site density functional theory of inhomogeneous molecular liquids

Intra-molecular interactions or chemical bonds represent one of the main distinguishing characteristics of molecular fluids. Development of accurate and practical methods to treat these effects is one of the long standing problems in classical site density functional theory (SDFT). One particular instance when these issues become particularly severe is the case of classical interaction potentials with auxiliary sites or dummy atoms. In this situation, current SDFT implementations, such as the three-dimensional reference interaction site model, lead to nonphysical results. We re-examine this issue in this work using our recent reformulation of SDFT (Valiev and Chuev, J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. 2018, 093201). We put forward a simple practical solution to this problem and illustrate its utility for the case of spherical solutes in diatomic liquids. Published under license by AIP Publishing.