L. Bonnet et Jc. Rayez, STATISTICAL-ANALYSIS OF THE RECOIL ENERGY-DISTRIBUTIONS IN THE PRODUCTS OF THE UNIMOLECULAR DISSOCIATIONS OF NO2 AND C2O, Chemical physics letters, 296(1-2), 1998, pp. 19-24
Recoil energy distributions in the products of the barrierless unimole
cular dissociations NO2 --> NO + O and C2O --> C + CO are derived with
in the framework of phase space theory (PST) in both cases where the r
eactant beam is supersonic or thermalized. The strong fluctuations obs
erved experimentally in the distributions are rationalized in terms of
vibrational level spacings, angular momentum constraints and the fact
that the density of states corresponding to a given rotational energy
of the nascent diatomic diverges when this energy tends to zero. Up t
o now, these fluctuations have not been considered as being compatible
with a statistical process. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights
reserved.