A WAVE-PACKET STUDY OF AR...I2 (B)-]AR+I+I ELECTRONIC PREDISSOCIATION

A Golden Rule wave packet treatment of Ar...I2 (B, upsilon' = 16-24) --> Ar + I + I electronic predissociation is presented. It is assumed that the I2 electronic state responsible for the predissociation is the repulsive a(3PI1g). The calculations were performed at a fixed T-shaped configuration for two different van der Waals potentials in the a(3PI1g) electronic state, one purely repulsive and the other attractive. It is found that only the attractive potential can reproduce the oscillations of the electronic predissociation rate as a function of the initial vibrational quantum number upsilon' of I2 Measured recently (M.L. Burke and W. Klemperer, J. Chem. Phys. 98 (1993) 6642).