Knowledge Bank

ketene $(CH2CO)$ in a supersonic free jet was photodissociated by a tunable puised laser in the frequency range just above the threshold for production of singlet methylene, $CH2(aA1).CH2$ was detected by laser-induced fluorescence (LIF). The appearance threshold and yield curve of individual CH3 rotational states were obtained by scanning the photolysis laser frequency with a fixed LIF probe laser frequency. The dissociation occurs on the ground electronic state potential energy surface. The tbreshold for $CH2CO-1CH2+CO$ is found to be $30116.2\pm 0.4cm$ . By varying the delay between the photolysis and probe pulses, a lower bound of $7\times 107s-5$ was set for the dissociation rate on the triplet surface at the singlet energy threshold. The yield curves, or photofragment excitation (PHOFEX) spectra, exhibit sharp steps spaced by the CO rotational term values. The experimental data provide a rigorous test of theoretical models of photofragment dynamics. The data clearly show that nuclear spin is conserved through the photodissociation. PHOFEX curves calculated from Phase Space Theory (PST) are in excellent agreement with the experiment and show that there is no barrier along the reaction coordinate. The singlet/triplet branching ratio as a function of photolysis laser frequency is inferred from PST fits to the PHOFEX data. The data show that the only dynamical constraints on product state rotational energy distributions are conservation of energy, angular momentun, and nuclear spin.