A recipe for evaluating and differentiating cos ϕ expressions

We present a simple recipe for calculating and differentiating cosine of bond angle and dihedral angle expressions. The resulting formulas can be incorporated in a straightforward manner into the bond angle and dihedral angle components of potential energy functions. These formulas rely only on expressions and derivatives of dot products, and, in particular, they avoid cross products as well as excessive Fortran function references. Consequently, the expressions derived in this article can be written compactly and evaluated rapidly.