In view of the wide success of molecular quasi-chemical theory of liquids,
this paper develops the soft-cutoff version of that theory. This development
has important practical consequences in the common cases that the packing
contribution dominates the solvation free energy of realistically-modeled
molecules because treatment of hard-core interactions usually requires special
purpose simulation methods. In contrast, treatment of smooth repulsive
interactions is typically straightforward on the basis of widely available
software. This development also shows how fluids composed of molecules with
smooth repulsive interactions can be treated analogously to the molecular-field
theory of the hard-sphere fluid. In the treatment of liquid water,
quasi-chemical theory with soft-cutoff conditioning doesn't change the
fundamental convergence characteristics of the theory using hard-cutoff
conditioning. In fact, hard cutoffs are found here to work better than softer
ones.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure