Rotational Dependency of the Stark Effect of a Polar Diatomic Molecule

Abstract

The calculation of the Stark effect of a rigid polar ¹Σ diatomic molecule neglects the effects of (1) the vibrational and electronic structures (2) the rotation—vibration interaction that contribute to the quadratic Stark effect. In this paper it is shown that the two effects have slightly different rotational dependency. The vibrational and electronic structures contribute a (cosine)² term that can be viewed as an anisotropy of polarizability, while the vibration—rotation interaction gives a similar, but distinct variation with rotational quantum numbers.