Pair potential

In physics, a pair potential is a function that describes the potential energy of two interacting objects solely as a function of the distance between them.^[1]

Some interactions, like Coulomb's law in electrodynamics or Newton's law of universal gravitation in mechanics naturally have this form for simple spherical objects. For other types of more complex interactions or objects it is useful and common to approximate the interaction by a pair potential, for example interatomic potentials in physics and computational chemistry that use approximations like the Lennard-Jones and Morse potentials.