The rotating Morse potential model for diatomic molecules in the tridiagonal J-matrix representation: I. Bound states

This is the first in a series of articles in which we study the rotating Morse potential model for diatomic molecules in the tridiagonal J-matrix representation. Here, we compute the bound-state energy spectrum by diagonalizing the finite-dimensional Hamiltonian matrix of H₂, LiH, HCl and CO molecules for arbitrary angular momentum. The calculation was performed using the J-matrix basis that supports a tridiagonal matrix representation for the reference Hamiltonian. Our results for these diatomic molecules have been compared with available numerical data satisfactorily. The proposed method is handy, very efficient, and it enhances accuracy by combining analytic power with a convergent and stable numerical technique.