A comparative review of fifty analytical representation of potential
energy interaction for diatomic systems: One Hundred Years of History
Abstract
Interatomic potentials laid at the heart of molecular physics. They are
a bridge between the spectroscopic and structural properties of
molecular systems. In this paper, a century-old review from 1920 to
2020, of functional forms used to analytically represent potential
energy as a function of interatomic distance for diatomic systems is
presented. With such a purpose fifty functions were selected. For all of
them, motivation and the main mathematical features are discussed. Our
goal is to provide a chronological pathway to the reader, even with
little knowledge on the subject, to understand how to calculate each
parameter that composes the interatomic potentials, as well as obtain
spectroscopic constants from them. Comparative evaluation for the
N2, CO, and HeH+ systems in their
ground electronic states are also presented.