A Quasiclassical trajectory study of collisional excitation in O( 3P)+CO 2

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The quasiclassical trajectory method is used to calculate cross sections for vibrational and rotational excitation in collisions of CO 2 with O( 3P) at relative translational energies from 2.2 to 6.0 eV. Rotational excitation is dominant at all but the highest energies. The largest vibrational excit cross sections for collisions with CO 2(000) are to excited bending states such as (010), (020), etc., and to excited symmetric stretch states. The 000 → 001 cross section is found to be quite small (⩽2 × 10 −18 cm 2 ) over the entire energy range, but the cross sections for excitation of combination states such as ( NN′1) are found to be considerably larger. Indeed the total asymmetric stretch excitation cross section is similar in magnitude to that obtained for Ar + CO 2 in recent molecular beam experiments.