Periodic systems of N-atom molecules

Abstract The atoms have long been classified into a periodic system, which is now based on quantum mechanics and group theory. A classification of molecules containing any number ( N ) of atoms is proposed. It is an extension of the periodic system of the atoms. The approach in this paper is that of group theory, although the proposed system has been subjected to exhaustive comparison with experimental and ab initio computational results for diatomic molecules, and conforms to the commonly known behaviours of molecules with larger N . Orthonormal transformations are performed so that the molecules can be arranged according to their numbers of electrons and to the differences of atomic numbers of the constituent atoms. These arrangements parallel the physical reality of atomic bonding and permit partial three-dimensional models of the systems to be constructed for molecules with as many as four atoms.