Rotational degeneracy

These results do not agree with experimental results. At room temperature, while the translational motion of diatomic molecules may be treated classically, the rotation and vibration have quantum attributes. In addition, quantum mechanically one should also consider the electronic degrees of freedom. However, typical electronic excitation energies are very large compared to k T (they are of the order of a few electronvolts, and 1 eV corresponds to 10 000 K). Such internal degrees of freedom are considered frozen, and an electronic cloud in a diatomic molecule is assumed to be in its ground state f with degeneracy g. The two nuclei A and... 

The rotational states are characterized by a quantum number J = 0, 1, 2,. .. are degenerate with degeneracy (2J + 1) and have energy t r = ) where 1 is the molecular moment of inertia. Thus... 

Because the rotational energies now depend on K (as well as on J), the degeneracies are lower than for spherical tops. In particular, because the energies do not depend on M and depend on the square of K, the degeneracies are (2J+1) for states with K=0 and 2(2J+1) for states with K > 0 the extra factor of 2 arises for K > 0 states because pairs of states with K = K and K = -K are degenerate. 

We have seen that for the electronic partition function there is no closed form expression (as there is for translation, rotation, and vibration) and one must know the energy and degeneracy of each state. That is. 

So, the calculation of the shape of an IR spectrum in the case of anticorrelated jumps of the orienting field in a complete vibrational-rotational basis reduces to inversion of matrix (7.38). This may be done with routine numerical methods, but it is impossible to carry out this procedure analytically. To elucidate qualitatively the nature of this phenomenon, one should consider a simplified energy scheme, containing only the states with j = 0,1. In [18] this scheme had four levels, because the authors neglected degeneracy of states with j = 1. Solution (7.39) [275] is free of this drawback and allows one to get a complete notion of the spectrum of such a system. 

In Eq. (44), gei(T ) is the ratio of transition state and reactant electronic partition functions [31] and the rotational degeneracy factor = (2ji + l)(2/2 + 1) for heteronuclear diatomics, and will also include nuclear spin considerations in the case of homonuclear diatomics. 

The degeneracies of the rotational energy levels are gj = 2J + 1. In terms of these quantities the rotational partition function becomes... 

---