Decay Paths from a Conical Intersection

Locating Decay Paths from a Conical Intersection 

However, the MEP may be a convenient measure of the progress of a molecule in a reaction, because in general a molecule will move, on average, along the MEP in a well-defined valley, and it is a good approximation of the motion of vibrationally cold systems (e.g., for photochemical reactions in which the excited state reactant has a small/controlled amount of vibrational excess energy). 

We have shown that an accessible conical intersection forms a bottleneck that separates the excited state branch of a nonadiabatic photochemical reaction path from the ground state branch, thus connecting the excited state reactant to two or more products on the ground state surface via a branching of the 

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