Intermolecular Structure and Collective Dynamics of Supercritical Fluoroform Studied by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

The density dependence of the local structure and of collective dynamics of a polar fluid fluoroform along an isotherm at a temperature of 1.03 Tc, in the near-critical (NC) region, were studied by classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. In the case of local structure we focus on local density inhomogeneities and on orientational pair correlations that are relevant to dielectric properties and light scattering intensities. Our results show that the density dependence of the frequency shifts of fluoroform ν₂ and ν₃ modes correlates well with that of intermolecular dipole–dipole interactions. Our study of collective dynamics deals with dipole and polarizability anisotropy relaxation, experimentally accessible through far-infrared absorption, depolarized light scattering, and optical Kerr effect. Our MD simulations were performed using an all-atom nonpolarizable potential model of fluoroform. Contributions of induced dipoles to dielectric properties were included using first-order perturbation theory, and this approach was also used to include interaction-induced contributions to polarizability anisotropy relaxation. For interactions involving induced dipoles, we calculated and compared the results of a distributed polarizability model to a model with a single polarizable site located at the center-of-mass. Using a projection scheme that allows us to identify the contributions from different relaxation mechanisms, we found that dipole relaxation is dominated by collective reorientation, while in the case of polarizability anisotropy, relaxation processes related to translational dynamics make a major contribution over most of the fluid density range. The dielectric properties of fluoroform in the NC region were calculated and compared to the corresponding measurements. We found the dielectric constant and the far-infrared absorption spectrum to be in good agreement with experiments.