The numbers of anharmonic potential constants of the fullerenes and

Abstract

The number of independent potential constants of degree n of a molecule is obtained from the reduction of the symmetric nth power of the representation of the vibrational degrees of freedom in the point group of the molecule. As an illustration, this theory is applied to the cubic and quartic potentials of the fullerenes (point group ) and (point group ). The numbers are extremely large, indicating that models with a considerably reduced number of parameters will be required for practical calculations.