MONTE-CARLO SIMULATION STUDY OF STATISTICAL LIMITS FOR ENERGY-TRANSFER IN BINARY MOLECULAR-COLLISIONS

Efficient Monte Carlo sampling methods are used to investigate the effect of the conservation of energy and angular momentum on energy transfer in Br2 + Ar and Br2 + Br2 collisions. The effect of the conservation of spatial configuration in the collision is also considered. The results show that angular momentum conservation has a small (10%-20%) but significant restraining effect on the energy transfer rate while the conservation of the spatial configuration reduced it by nearly 50%. The effects of anharmonicity in the bond potential of the diatomic molecule are also studied and found to be significant. Comparison with trajectory calculations reemphasizes the observation that for small molecules the energy transfer approaches the statistical limits only for strong interaction potentials.