Halogen Photodissociation in Rare Gas Solids

Over the past few years, a beautiful series of simulations and experiments have been performed by Alimi, Gerber, and Apkarian on the photodissociation of 12,173.174 and hI173.i75.i76 i different rare gas solids. While 

For the purely classical simulations, the photodissociation process was started by randomly switching the diatom from the ground state to a repulsive excited state while adjusting the vibrational kinetic energy to give the desired excitation energy. After photodissociation, up to 20 ps of dynamics were run. Alimi et al. found that the fragments were essentially thermalized after this time. 

One of the properties that make these simulations so interesting is that, since the system is solid, one can easily define a cage for the photodissociating 

---