A study of the bending motion in tetratomic molecules by the algebraic operator expansion method.

We study the bending motion in the tetratomic molecules C2H2 (X̃ (1)Σg (+)), C2H2 (Ã (1)Au) trans-S1, C2H2 (Ã (1)A2) cis-S1, and X̃ (1)A1 H2CO. We show that the algebraic operator expansion method with only linear terms comprised of the basic operators is able to describe the main features of the level energies in these molecules in terms of two (linear) or three (trans-bent, cis-bent, and branched) parameters. By including quadratic terms, the rms deviation in comparison with experiment goes down to typically ∼10 cm(-1) over the entire range of energy 0-6000 cm(-1).