Unimolecular processes in weakly bound complexes: correlated product state distributions

Abstract

Correlated product state distributions have been measured for the photodissociation of several weakly bound binary complexes. In addition, large electric fields are used to orient the parent molecules prior to photolysis. Although the experimental final state distributions are overall highly non-statistical, the results indicate that a subset of the available phase space may be sampled statistically. We consider a number of different systems, classifying their behaviour in terms of which degrees of freedom are strongly coupled, and result in statistical distributions in the corresponding fragment modes, and which are decoupled from this statistical part of the phase space.