Knowledge Bank

Chlorine Nitratge ($CIONO2$), which serves as a temporary reservoir in the $stratosphere1$ for both $NOx$ (i.e. $NO$ and $NO2$) and $ClOx$ (i.e. $Cl$ and $ClO$) species, may have three different UV photolysis pathways: (1) $CIONO2\to Cl+NO3,(2)ClONO2\to ClO+NO2$ and (3) $CIONO2\to O+CIONO$. We have analyzed the first path way. Geometries and energies of the initial state $CIONO2(I1A)$, the final states $NO3(2A)+Cl(2P)$ and the transition state $Cl\cdots ONO2$ have been optimized by using $HF/6-31G\ast$ basis set of the GAMESS program. The results obtained for the intial state agrees with that of Grana et $al.2$ The energy of the transition state is 0.1058 h above the initial state and 0.0807 h above the final state.