PRODUCT ROTATIONAL POLARIZATION IN PHOTON-INITIATED BIMOLECULAR REACTIONS

This paper concerns the semiclassical description, calculation and mea surement of angular momentum polarization in the products of elementar y gas-phase bimolecular reactions, A unified, semiclassical treatment of the centre-of-mass correlated (k,k',j') angular distribution involv ing the reagent and product relative velocity and the product angular momentum vectors is described, and is related to other methodologies a lready existing in the Literature. Explicit expressions are provided e nabling experimentalists to extract rotational polarization informatio n from crossed-molecular beam and photon-initiated reaction studies, u nder a variety of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the strategy d eveloped is well suited to the theoretical calculation of reaction pro duct polarization, in particular, using classical trajectory methods, An illustrative example of such a calculation is presented, and the ce ntre-of-mass polarization data provided is used to simulate the labora tory frame rotational moments that can be determined experimentally us ing 1+1 Doppler-resolved polarized Laser product probing techniques. ( C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.