Quartic anharmonic interactions

This formula is derived in Appendix 3). With regard to various cubic and quartic anharmonic interactions, the quantity ft is characterized by a certain combination of these anharmonic contributions and becomes dependent on k (see Eq. (4.3.14) for a related quantity and Ref. 140). However, this dependence is insignificant compared to the k-dependence appearing in the denominators of Eqs. (4.3.32) and (4.3.34). Therefore, spectral characteristics defined by formulae (4.3.32) can with good reason be regarded as proportional to certain functions of lateral interaction parameters and of the resonance width 77 ... 

H3 and describe the cubic and quartic anharmonic interactions higher-order terras are neglected in the Taylor expansion of the potential energy. H is given by... 

Force fields up to quartic anharmonic terms are now known with reasonably high accuracy for several triatomic molecules and the results shown in Table 3 for H2O are typical. However, even for these there has had to be an assumption that some of the quartic interaction terms are zero in order that the equations from which the constants are derived shall have unique solutions. It can be seen moreover that some of the cubic and quartic terms have uncertainties which are larger than the values of the constants themselves. 

The discussion so far may be summarized as follows. There are two reasons for using curvilinear co-ordinates to represent the anharmonic force field of a polyatomic molecule, despite their apparent complexity. The first is that it is only in this way that we obtain cubic and quartic force constants which are independent of isotopic substitution. The second is that in terms of curvilinear bond-stretching and angle-bending co-ordinates we obtain the simplest expression for the force field, in the sense that cubic and quartic interaction terms are minimized. The first reason is compulsive the second reason is not compulsive, but it does make the curvilinear co-ordinates very desirable. 

One conclusion is clear the dominant cubic and quartic interaction force constants are those associated with bond stretching, and these are not dissimilar to those of the corresponding diatomics. The same conclusion follows from a study of all other published data, and comparisons between bondstretching anharmonicity in related molecules are discussed further below (see Table 15). 

From calculations made for a number of simple molecules, it has become clear that in the cubic and quartic part of the potential written in curvilinear valence-force coordinates, the diagonal bond-stretching force constants (fm and fmr) are much larger than the bending and interaction constants. On this observation is based the simplest model potential, the anharmonic simple valence-force (SVF) model that consists of a complete harmonic potentialf with only the diagonal cubic and quartic stretching constants) and fmr added,... 

This can be achieved most easily with a careful choice of internal coordinates. Since anharmonic force fields are usually expanded only up to fourth order, it is of considerable importance that cubic and quartic interaction terms in internal coordinates are minimized due to the curvilinear nature of these coordinates. However, this does not mean that a truncated power series expansion will behave correctly farther away from the reference geometry usual expansions suffer from convergence problems. 

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