John A. Coxon 

Professor, Retired

BA (Cambridge), MSc, PhD (East Anglia, England)

E-mail: john.coxon@dal.ca
Phone: (902) 494-3305
Fax: (902) 494-1310

Address: Department of Chemistry
Dalhousie University
Halifax, NS
Canada    B3H 4J3
 
Research Interests: Chemical Physics; Physical Chemistry. 

Current research is focused principally on the development and application of numerical methods for the determination of accurate internuclear potential energy functions of diatomic molecules from spectroscopic data. The potential energy function of a molecule, which specifies information on the properties of interest to chemists – the equilibrium bond length, the bond strength, the equilibrium force constant, and the quantized vibrational-rotational energies – is also the fundamental and most concise representation of the patterns of experimental line frequencies that are measured by spectroscopists, whether these be from pure rotational transitions in the microwave or near-ir regions, or vibrational-rotational transitions in the infrared region, or resolved structure of electronic transitions in the visible/uv regions.

Only in recent years has it been possible to devise analytic potential energy functions that are both compact (few adjustable parameters) as well as sufficiently flexible to represent the precise and extensive high resolution data provided by modern laser spectroscopies, and which are stable (providing sensible extrapolations) and capable of incorporating correct physical behaviour in the “long-range region” near the dissociation limit. Applications of direct potential fitting (DPF) methods that employ such analytic model potentials have been the focus or our recent work, and have been highly successful in providing accurate potential energy functions for the ground electronic states of CO, HF, LiH, Li₂ and Cs₂, and for the A¹Σ⁺ excited states of LiH and Li₂.

 
 
Research Publications:  See List.