The Atom-Atom Potential Method: Applications to Organic Molecular Solids

The history of physics furnishes many examples of how a simple semiem­ pirical method, essentially based on intuitive considerations, may prove to be much more successful than a rigorous theoretical approach. A pertinent example is the method of atom-atom potentials, which treats the intermolec­ ular interactions between polyatomic molecules in terms of pairwise inter­ actions between their constituent atoms. Despite a few conceptual short­ comings, the method provides a fairly reliable pra...