I have a problem concerning the orthogonalization of a coordinate system; this is necessary in the context of a normal mode analysis of molecular vibrations. I am working on H2O, giving me a 9-dimensional vector space, with six (orthogonal) basis vectors predetermined by describing rotational and translational motion of the entire molecule. I want to determine the three remaining vectors by a modified Gram-Schmidt process, but in my case, this somehow fails due to G-S constructing a zero vector.
As far as I understand, zero vectors from Gram-Schmidt may occur if there is linear dependency somewhere in my set of vectors, but given that my six vectors are mutually orthogonal I don't know how this might be the case (let alone how I could avoid it).
The six predetermined vectors are:
trans-x trans-y trans-z rot-xx rot-yy rot-zz 3.9994 0 0 0 0.2552 0 0 3.9994 0 -0.2552 0 0 0 0 3.9994 0 0 0 1.0039 0 0 0 -0.5084 -0.7839 0 1.0039 0 0.5084 0 0 0 0 1.0039 0.7839 0 0 1.0039 0 0 0 -0.5084 0.7839 0 1.0039 0 0.5084 0 0 0 0 1.0039 -0.7839 0 0
Can you see where the problem lies? I've been looking over this for a few days now, including trying alternative approaches at the orthogonalization problem, and I am starting to get frustrated. Given that my Gram-Schmidt algorithm produces a valid 9-dimensional orthogonal set if I use only the first three vectors (the translational coordinates), I assume my implementation to be correct and the problem to be somewhere in the rotational coordinate vectors. But I am at loss about what exactly is going wrong here. (In the end, it's probably just an example of not seeing the forest for the trees ...)
Regards
-M.