Energy levels and structure of tetra-atomic van der Waals clusters

A variational treatment is presented to study bound and quasibound states of X1...BC...X2 van der Waals clusters, where X1 and X2 are rare gas atoms and BC is a conventional diatomic molecule. The Hamiltonian operator, including all the degrees of freedom, is expressed in terms of the B–C relative vector and bond coordinates which describe the position of each rare gas atom with respect to the BC center of mass. In a body-fixed reference system, with the Z axis parallel to the diatomic axis, all the matrix elements of the Hamiltonian are evaluated in a basis set of functions which takes into account the symmetries of the system. Numerical applications to the He2...Cl2 and Ne2...I2 complexes are presented and discussed.