The Axilrod–Teller potential in molecular physics, is a three-body potential that results from a third-order perturbation correction to the attractive London dispersion interactions (instantaneous induced dipole-induced dipole) where is the distance between atoms and , and is the angle between the vectors and . The coefficient is positive and of the order , where is the ionization energy and is the mean atomic polarizability; the exact value of depends on the magnitudes of the dipole matrix elements and on the energies of the orbitals. References Chemical bonding Quantum mechanical potentials