  Dipolar Bose and Fermi gases, which are currently being studied extensively
experimentally and theoretically, interact through anisotropic, long-range
potentials. Here, we replace the long-range potential by a zero-range
pseudo-potential that simplifies the theoretical treatment of two dipolar
particles in a harmonic trap. Our zero-range pseudo-potential description
reproduces the energy spectrum of two dipoles interacting through a
shape-dependent potential under external confinement very well, provided that
sufficiently many partial waves are included, and readily leads to a
classification scheme of the energy spectrum in terms of approximate angular
momentum quantum numbers. The results may be directly relevant to the physics
of dipolar gases loaded into optical lattices.
