Effects of fragment symmetry and rotation in decomposition of excited ions

Abstract

The fragmentation of an internally-excited ion will in general give rise to some orbital motion of the separating species. The angular momentum of this motion and of the rotations of the fragments will show correlations, the nature of which are explored in this paper for some simplified cases. The use of classical partition functions to derive densities of rotational states by which the fragmentation may be described is called into question.

Numerical computations for two reactions of the C₂H⁺₆ ion are described and compared with experimental data.