Cl(3,0) interatomic potentials, despite their algebraic elegance, predict force magnitudes accurately but force directions poorly. Across ten rMD17 molecules, every
L≤1 baseline in our twelve-model study attains aggregate force-cosine similarity below
0.25. The cause is structural. The geometric product of two vectors in
R3 realises only the
L=0 and
L=1 components of its irreducible representation content, leaving the symmetric-traceless rank-2 component absent from the per-edge bilinear that drives each message-passing layer. We address this with CliffordSTF, which couples the Clifford multivector to closed-form symmetric-traceless tensor tracks at ranks two and three through bilinear cross-track contractions, using a single learned bilinear and no Clebsch--Gordan tables, Wigner-
D matrices, or e3nn calls. On rMD17, CliffordSTF raises aggregate force-cosine similarity from
0.055 (base Clifford) to
0.551, an order-of-magnitude relative directional gain, alongside improved magnitude accuracy (force MAE
15.8% lower; energy MAE
10.9% lower). It outperforms all CG-free or body-ordered baselines in our study (all
≤0.17). On catalysis benchmarks, CliffordSTF achieves the best out-of-distribution S2EF energy MAE on OC22 in our experiments, and the best in-distribution energy MAE among
L≥2 methods on OC22 IS2RE. An eleven-variant ablation shows the two tracks are complementary: neither alone matches the combined model.