Many-body interactions in rare gases

The strong evidence that realistic pair potentials plus long-range many-body interactions provide an accurate quantitative description of the properties of gaseous and condensed rare gases is reviewed. The difficulties of ab initio quantal calculations of overlap-dependent many-body interactions are emphasized. It is shown that existing calculations are insufficient to justify the recently stated and repeated conclusion that the agreement with experiment found with such potentials is fortuitous. © 1986 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.