Insights into atomic orbital polarization in polyatomic dissociation from DC slide velocity map imaging

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] "The field of chemical reaction dynamics is based upon understanding the details of elementary chemical reactions. It seeks to answer fundamental questions such as, what pathways does the reaction follow? what product states are formed? what determines the energy disposal, and the angular distributions of the products? State-of-the-art experimental methods developed over time along with theoretical techniques and advanced computational methods provide a toolset to address these questions. Achieving deep insight into reaction mechanisms ultimately permits the control over their chemical reactivity. One way of apprehending these processes is to characterize the potential energy surface (PES) since they completely embody the forces between the constituent atoms. .. Photodissociation of small molecules has been studied using variety of detection methods, such as, photofragment translational spectroscopy, [4,5] Laser-induced fluorescence (LIF), [6] Doppler-related methods, [7] Rydberg tagging, [8,9] photofragment ion imaging [10] and photoelectron imaging. [11] Photofragment imaging is now the most widely used method to study photodissociation dynamics. In the simplest illustration, it maps the recoil velocity distribution of the state selected product onto a position sensitive detector plane and energy and the angular distributions information are extracted by reconstruction of the experimentally observed images. The main objective of the this work is to study the vector correlations of photodissociation using photofragment ion imaging technique."--Introduction.