Voronoi deformation density (VDD) charges: Assessment of the Mulliken, Bader, Hirshfeld, Weinhold, and VDD methods for charge analysis

We present the Voronoi Deformation Density (VDD) method for computing atomic charges. The VDD method does not explicitly use the basis functions but calculates the amount of electronic density that flows to or from a certain atom due to bond formation by spatial integration of the deformation density over the atomic Voronoi cell. We compare our method to the well-known Mulliken, Hirshfeld, Bader, and Weinhold Natural Population Analysis (NPA) charges for a variety of biological, organic, and inorganic molecules. The Mulliken charges are (again) shown to be useless due to heavy basis set dependency, and the Bader charges (and often also the NPA charges) are not realistic, yielding too extreme values that suggest much ionic character even in the case of covalent bonds. The Hirshfeld and VDD charges, which prove to be numerically very similar, are to be recommended because they yield chemically meaningful charges. We stress the need to use spatial integration over an atomic domain to get rid of basis set dependency, and the need to integrate the deformation density in order to obtain a realistic picture of the charge rearrangement upon bonding. An asset of the VDD charges is the transparency of the approach owing to the simple geometric partitioning of space. The deformation density based charges prove to conform to chemical experience.