Analytical treatment of Coriolis coupling for three-body systems

In a previous article [J. Chem. Phys. 108 (1998) 5216], an efficient method was presented for performing “exact” quantum calculations for the three-body rovibrational Hamiltonian, within the helicity-conserving approximation. This approach makes use of a certain three-body “effective potential,” enabling the same bend angle basis set to be employed for all values of the rotational quantum numbers, J, K and M. In the present work, the method is extended to incorporate Coriolis coupling, for which the relevant matrix elements are derived exactly. These can be used to solve the full three-body rovibrational problem, in the standard Jacobi coordinate vector embedding. Generalization of the method for coupled kinetic energy operators arising from other coordinate systems, embeddings, and/or system sizes, is also discussed.