Final State Energy Distributions for Exoergic Reactions

Abstract

The rapid development of laser techniques makes it possible to get detailed information about product state distributions for reactive collisions. It is the objective of this paper to present a model which makes a priori predictions about vibrational, translational and rotational final state distributions. The vibrational and the translational degrees of freedom are treated quantum mechanically in close analogy to a collinear system. The rotation is treated statistically. The application of the saddle-point method brings into the theory a distribution parameter which might be looked at as the generalization of the scheme of an internal temperature to systems for which the a priori probability of final state population is still dictated by the dynamics. Applications to very exothermic triatomic exchange reactions are discussed and the theoretical predictions are compared with experiments. The work has been performed in collaboration with G. Venzl [1,2,3].