LOW-LYING ELECTRONICALLY EXCITED-STATES OF CH3CL - COMPARISON OF THEORY AND EXPERIMENT

Electron energy loss spectroscopy is used to determine the energies of the low-lying singlet and triplet states of methyl chloride. The expe rimental results are interpreted with the aid of ab initio calculation s. The triplet n --> sigma(C-Cl) state is found to lie about 0.4 eV b elow the singlet n --> sigma(C-Cl) state. Both the electron energy lo ss measurements and the calculations indicate that it is possible to d istinguish singlet and triplet states derived from the n --> 4s and n --> 4p excitations.