Unimolecular dissociation lifetime function

Whenever the absorbing species undergoes one or more processes that depletes its numbers, we say that it has a finite lifetime. For example, a species that undergoes unimolecular dissociation has a finite lifetime, as does an excited state of a molecule that decays by spontaneous emission of a photon. Any process that depletes the absorbing species contributes another source of time dependence for the dipole time correlation functions C(t) discussed above. This time dependence is usually modeled by appending, in a multiplicative manner, a factor exp(-ltl/x). This, in turn modifies the line shape function I(co) in a manner much like that discussed when treating the rotational diffusion case ... 

If the lifetime of the excited resonance state is too long for direct measurement of the rate via the widths of the spectral features, one can use a third laser (the probe laser in Fig. 11) to resonantly promote the molecules from this level to a rovibrational level in the excited electronic state. The decrease of the total LIF signal as function of the delay time between pump and probe laser reflects the state-specific dissociation rate. The limitation of the SEP technique is that an excited state has to be found, which lives long enough and which is accessible by all three lasers. Molecules, which have been studied by SEP spectroscopy in the context of unimolecular dissociation, are HCO, DCO, HFCO and CH3O. 

In this chapter, we discussed the principle quantum mechanical effects inherent to the dynamics of unimolecular dissociation. The starting point of our analysis is the concept of discrete metastable states (resonances) in the dissociation continuum, introduced in Sect. 2 and then amply illustrated in Sects. 5 and 6. Resonances allow one to treat the spectroscopic and kinetic aspects of unimolecular dissociation on equal grounds — they are spectroscopically measurable states and, at the same time, the states in which a molecule can be temporally trapped so that it can be stabilized in collisions with bath particles. The main property of quantum state-resolved unimolecular dissociation is that the lifetimes and hence the dissociation rates strongly fluctuate from state to state — they are intimately related to the shape of the resonance wave functions in the potential well. These fluctuations are universal in that they are observed in mode-specific, statistical state-specific and mixed systems. Thus, the classical notion of an energy dependent reaction rate is not strictly valid in quantum mechanics Molecules activated with equal amounts of energy but in different resonance states can decay with drastically different rates. 

The development of a theory of unimolecular reactions proceeded rapidly in the mid-1920s, initiated by Hinshelwood with an A whose collision-free lifetime for reaction was approximated by an energy-independent one. The analysis was much elaborated by Rice and Ramsperger [60] and Kassel [61], known later as the RRK theory, where now the lifetime was, as it is in modern times, energy-dependent [62]. These theoretical works of the 1920s stimulated many measurements of the unimolecular rates of dissociation of organic compounds as a function of the gas pressure. Within a few years, however, this entire field collapsed or, more precisely, evolved into a new field It was shown experimentally that the unimolecular reactions , assumed originally to consist of only one chemical step, in-... 

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