Subject: Stability of inertial axes

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 17:41:20 -0800

When you define an internal coordinate system for a molecule by
diagonalization of its inertial tensor, the definition obviously becomes
ambiguous for degenerate eigenvalues, and it is unstable for nearly
degenerate eigenvalues. Has anyone come across either
(i) a criterion how to detect such an instability (that would somehow
involve an error model), or
(ii) even a method how to remove it (that would somehow use information
beyond the inertial tensor)?

Wolfgang Huber
IBM Research Almaden
San Jose CA, USA