Dihedral molecular configurations interacting by Lennard-Jones and Coulomb forces

In this paper, we investigate nonlinear periodic vibrations of a group of particles with a planar dihedral configuration governed by the Lennard-Jones and Coulomb forces. Using the gradient equivariant degree, we provide a full topological classification of the periodic solutions with both temporal and spatial symmetries. In the process, we provide general formulae for the spectrum of the linearized system of equations describing the above configuration, which allows us to obtain the critical frequencies of the particles' motions. The obtained frequencies represent the set of all critical periods for small amplitude periodic solutions emerging from a given stationary symmetric orbit of solutions.