Can molecular dynamics help in understanding dielectric phenomena?

Molecular dynamics (MD) is a modeling technique widely used in material science as well as in chemical physics, biochemistry and biophysics. MD is based on 'first principles', allowing one to compute the physical characteristics of a material, such as density, heat capacity, isothermal compressibility and also the dielectric constant and relaxation, mixing a classical physics approach and statistical mechanics. Although a number of papers exist in the literature concerning the study of the dielectric properties of liquid and solid materials, the MD approach appears to be almost ignored in the electromagnetic aquametry community. We use a rather simple example, a mixture of ethanol and water at various concentrations, to introduce MD as a theoretical tool for investigating the dielectric behavior of more complex moist substances. We show that MD simulations suggest a time-domain model for alcohol-water solutions, consisting in a mixture of a KWW stretched-exponential and a simple exponential, whose validity could be subjected to an experimental verification.