Libra described

Depending on the character of the molecular motions, one can distinguish several physical situations. In most cases, the molecules are trapped in relatively deep potential wells. Then, they perform small translational and orientational oscillations around well-defined equilibrium positions and orientations. Such motions are reasonably well described by the harmonic approximation. The collective vibrational excitations of the crystal, which are considered as a set of harmonic oscillators, are called phonons. Those phonons that represent pure angular oscillations, or libra-tions, are called librons. For some properties it turns out to be necessary to look at the effects of anharmonicities. Anharmonic corrections to the harmonic model can be made by perturbation theory or by the self-consistent phonon method. These methods, which are summarized in Section III under the name quasi-harmonic theories, can be considered to be the standard tools in lattice dynamics calculations, in addition to the harmonic model. They are only applicable in the case of fairly small amplitude motions. Only the simple harmonic approximation is widely used the calculation of anharmonic corrections is often hard in practice. For detailed descriptions of these methods, we refer the reader to the books and reviews by Maradudin et al. (1968, 1971, 1974), Cochran and Cowley (1967), Barron and Klein (1974), Birman (1974), Wallace (1972), and Cali-fano et al. (1981). 

The ab initio potentials used in solid nitrogen are from Refs. [31] and [32]. They have been respresented by a spherical expansion, Eq. (3), with coefficients up to = 6 and Lg = 6 inclusive, which describe the anisotropic short-range repulsion, the multipole-multipole interactions and the anisotropic dispersion interactions. They have also been fitted by a site-site model potential, Eq. (5), with force centers shifted away from the atoms, optimized for each interaction contribution. In the most advanced lattice dynamics model used, the TDH or RPA model, the libra-tions are expanded in spherical harmonics up to / = 12 and the translational vibrations in harmonic oscillator functions up to = 4, inclusive. 

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