Arbitrarily Shaped Rigid Rotor
An arbitrarily shaped rigid rotor is a rigid body of arbitrary shape with its center of mass fixed (or in uniform rectilinear motion) in field-free space R3, so that its energy consists only of rotational kinetic energy (and possibly constant translational energy that can be ignored). A rigid body can be (partially) characterized by the three eigenvalues of its moment of inertia tensor, which are real nonnegative values known as principal moments of inertia. In microwave spectroscopy—the spectroscopy based on rotational transitions—one usually classifies molecules (seen as rigid rotors) as follows:
- spherical rotors
- symmetric rotors
- oblate symmetric rotors
- prolate symmetric rotors
- asymmetric rotors
This classification depends on the relative magnitudes of the principal moments of inertia.
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