Electrostatic solvent effects on the electronic structure of ground and excited states of molecules: Applications of a cavity model based upon a finite element method

We present investigations on the use of dielectric continuum models for the self‐consistent description of electrostatic solvent effects on the ground state of a molecule and on excitation energies. The electronic structure calculations have been carried out in the framework of the INDO and INDO/S‐CI method, respectively. We compare the performance of three implementations of the cavity model that all allow an arbitrary shape of the solute cavity. The procedures differ in the effort spent on the description of the charge density at the cavity surface. Two procedures in the vein of Miertus̆, Scrocco, and Tomasi (MST) rely upon point charges to model the reaction field and differ in the way the cavity surface is modeled. While one implementation divides the surface into flat triangular patches, the improved version uses curved triangles. Alternatively, we investigate a finite element method (FEM) for the calculation of the surface charge density. Applications to rod‐shaped organic molecules (including their charge transfer excitations) illustrate the superiority of the improved MST formalism over the primitive one, as it exhibits faster convergence of the results with increasing node density on the cavity surface. The FEM approach, which also employs curved surface patches, leads to a further improvement as it needs less computational effort, especially in the treatment of excited states. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.