Vibrationally inelastic scattering in collinear systems: the effect of minima in the interaction potential

Abstract

Quantum mechanical calculations have been made of vibrational transition probabilities for a non-reactive collinear atom–diatom collision. The interaction potential was expressed as a disjoint Morse function in which the repulsive wall was kept constant and the depth of the attractive well varied. Calculations show that the system becomes more elastic as the depth of the well increases and this has been attributed to a partial cancellation between the attractive and repulsive contributions to the off-diagonal elements of the interaction potential in the oscillator basis.