PHOTODISSOCIATION OF HG-AR VANDERWAALS MOLECULES - ALIGNMENT EFFECTS

We present a calculation of the polarization of the fluorescence from the Hg lambda 253.7 nm transition following photodissociation of the Hg-Ar van der Waals molecule. For this case, it is possible to produce appreciable photodissociation near to threshold directly from the ground vibrational state. This means one can study the nonadiabatic mixing of molecular states over a wide range of translational energies by varying the frequency of the dissociating light. The formalism of Singer et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 79, 6060 (1983)] is used to cast the observables in terms of reduced half-collision T matrix elements. These half-collision fragmentation matrix elements have been found using a time propagation method.