To
rationally design new molecular materials with desirable linear
optical properties, such as refractive index or birefringence, we
investigated how atomic and functional-group polarizability tensors
of prototypical molecules respond to crystal field effects. By building
finite aggregates of urea, succinic acid, p-nitroaniline,
4-mercaptopyridine, or methylbenzoate, and by partitioning the cluster
electronic density using quantum theory of atoms in molecules, we
could extract atoms and functional groups from the aggregates and
estimate their polarizability enhancements with respect to values
calculated for molecules in isolation. The isotropic polarizability
and its anisotropy for the molecular building blocks are used to understand
the functional-group sources of optical properties in these model
systems, which could help the synthetic chemist to fabricate efficient
materials. This analysis is complemented by benchmarking density functionals
for atomic distributed polarizabilities in gas phase, by comparing
the results with refractive-index calculations under periodic boundary
conditions, and by estimating functional-group optical properties
from a classical electrostatic atom–dipole interaction model.