Potential Energy Surfaces is a collection of lectures given at the 1996 Mariapfarr Workshop in Theoretical Chemistry, organized by Alexander F. Sax. The Mariapfarr Workshops' aim is to discuss in-depth topics in Theoretical Chemistry. The target group of these workshops is graduate students and postdocs.

Hypersurfaces and Coordinate Systems

1 Preliminaries
2 Metric spaces
3 Vector spaces
4 Affine and Euclidian spaces
5 Manifolds
6 Coordinate systems used for molecules
References
The Idea of a Potential Energy Surface
1 Introduction
2 The removal of translational motion
3 Distinguishing electronic and nuclear motions
4 The body-fixed Hamiltonian
5 Separating electronic and nuclear motions
6 The clamped nucleus Hamiltonian
7 The Potential Energy Function
8 Conclusions
References
Interpolation and fitting of potential energy surfaces: Concepts, recipes and applications
1 Introduction
2 General functional forms
3 Specific forms for diatomic and polyatomic systems
4 Combination of theoretical and experimental data
5 Comparison of different fits in some test cases
6 Formulae for Lagrange-, Hermite-and spline-interpolations
7 Acknowledgments and literature
8 Appendix
Empirical Classical Force Fields for Molecular Systems
1 Introduction
2 Choice of the explicit degrees of freedom
3 Force field terms
4 Conclusion
References
The Born-Oppenheimer Expansion: Eigenvalues, Eigenfunctions and Low-Energy Scattering
1 Introduction
2 Spectral Asymptotics
3 Low energy scattering for diatomic molecules
References.