Are all-atom any better than united-atom force fields for the description of liquid properties of alkanes?

Alkanes are a fundamental part in empirical force fields (FF) not only due to their technological relevance, but also due to the prevalence of alkane moieties in organic molecules, e.g., compounds containing a saturated carbon chain. Therefore, a good description of alkane interactions is crucial for determining the quality of a FF. In this study, the performance of 12 empirical force fields (FF) was evaluated in the context of reproducing liquid properties of alkanes. More specifically, n-octane was chosen as a reference compound since it is a liquid in a broad temperature range and it has numerous experimental data for thermodynamic, transport, and structural properties, as well as for their temperature dependencies. A normalized root-mean-square deviation (NRMSD) analysis was used to rank the force fields in their ability to reproduce the experimental data. Five out of the six best force fields considered were united-atom models. The GROMOS force field showed the smallest deviation in terms of NRMSD, followed by TRAPPE-EH, NERD, CHARMM-UA, TRAPPE-UA, and OPLS-UA. This overall better performance of the united-atom force fields indicates that complexity does not always bring quality.