NDDO FRAGMENT SELF-CONSISTENT FIELD APPROXIMATION FOR LARGE ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS

A semi-empirical NDDO method, generalized from a similar scheme at the CNDO/2 level developed previously, is presented to treat very large molecules. The extended molecular system is divided into a relatively small subsystem where substantial chemical changes take place and an environment remaining more-or-less unperturbed during the process. Expanding the wave function on an atomic hybrid basis an SCF procedure is performed for the subsystem in the field of the iteratively determined electronic distribution of the environment. A computer program has been written for the IBM RISC System/6000 530 computer and several test calculations were done for a variety of large classical molecules, like substituted aliphatic hydrocarbons, water oligomers, and a heptapeptide. Protonation energies, proton transfer potential curves, rotational barriers, atomic net charges, and HOMO and LUMO energies, as computed by the exact version of the NDDO method, are fairly well reproduced by our approximation if the subsystem is appropriately defined.