SPECTROSCOPY AND DYNAMICS OF THE HIGHLY EXCITED NONROTATING 3-DIMENSIONAL H-3+ MOLECULAR ION

A study of the bound states of the H3+ molecular ion at zero total angular momentum is presented. Wave functions are shown for the accurate ab initio Meyer-Botschwina-Burton potential energy surface and the more approximate diatomics in molecules (DIM) surface. The qualitative behavior is similar for the two potentials. The analytic form of the DIM surface enables a study that reaches energies as high as the dissociation threshold. Quantum states are found to localize regularly around the horseshoe periodic orbits found in previous classical studies. There is good agreement between a semiclassical periodic orbit quantization formula and the exact quantum energies. The antisymmetric stretch frequency with respect to the orbit is estimated classically and quantum mechanically and found to be in agreement with a previous estimate. A three-dimensional stability analysis of the horseshoe orbit is presented and used as a basis for the semiclassical theory. The implications on the assignment of the coarse grained photodissociation spectrum measured by Carrington and Kennedy are discussed. © 1990 American Institute of Physics.