Many-Body Dispersion Interactions in Molecular Materials

In this work, we have developed an efficient method for obtaining an accurate theoretical description of van der Waals (vdW) interactions that includes both long-range Coulomb electrodynamic response screening effects as well as treatment of the many-body vdW energy to infinite order. This method goes beyond the standard $C_6/R^6$ pairwise additive approximation and can easily be coupled to a wide array of theoretical methods, ranging from classical force fields to higher-level quantum chemical calculations. To demonstrate the increasingly important role played by many-body vdW interactions in large, structurally complex molecular systems, we use this method to investigate several pertinent molecular properties, such as binding energies/affinities in gas-phase molecular dimers and supramolecular complexes, relative conformational energetics in small polypeptides, and thermodynamic stabilities among competing molecular crystal polymorphs.