Unimolecular dissociation of HCO Part III. Comparison of calculated and measured CO rotational-state distributions

Abstract

We present calculations for the unimolecular dissociation of HCO in the electronic ground state for total angular momenta J = 1 and 3. The calculated rotational-state distributions for CO are compared with recent experimental results and the agreement is found to be excellent. Of particular interest is the influence of the overall rotation of the parent molecule. It is demonstrated how the final rotational-state distributions reflect the angular dependence of the wavefunction at the transition state.