PRECISE SOLUTION OF THE ROTATION BENDING SCHRODINGER EQUATION FOR A TRIATOMIC MOLECULE WITH APPLICATION TO THE WATER MOLECULE

In this paper we report the results of improving the non-rigid bender formulation of the rotation-vibration Hamiltonian of a triatomic molecule [see A. R. Hoy and P. R. Bunker, J. Mol. Spectrosc., 52, 439 (1974)]. This improved Hamiltonian can be diagonalized as before by a combination of numerical integration and matrix diagonalization and it yields rotation-bending energies to high values of the rotational quantum numbers. We have calculated all the rotational energy levels up to J = 10 for the (v1, v2, v3) states (0, 0, 0) and (0, 1, 0) for both H2O and D2O. By least squares fitting to the observations varying seven parameters we have refined the equilibrium structure and force field of the water molecule and have obtained a fit to the 375 experimental energies used with a root mean square deviation of 0.05 cm-1. The equilibrium bond angle and bond length are determined to be 104.48° and 0.9578 Å respectively. We have also calculated these energy levels using the ab initio equilibrium geometry and force constants of Rosenberg, Ermler and Shavitt [J. Chem. Phys., 65, 4072 (1976)] and this is then the first complete ab initio calculation of rotation-vibration energy levels of high J in a polyatomic molecule to this precision. the rms fit of these ab initio energies to the experimental energies for the H2O molecule is 2.65 cm-1. © 1979.