Reduced potential-energy curves for diatomic molecules

Abstract

A simple prescription for scaling diatomic potentials so that they have a common dissociation limit and fixed curvature near the minimum is used to examine 35 diatomic potentials which are known over relatively large fractions of their well depths. These global comparisons reveal greater similarity, particularly among chemically related molecules, than might be predicted from spectroscopic properties that are based on derivatives of the potential near its minimum.