Exact treatment of reactive scattering in the Torres-Vega-Frederick quantum phase-space representation.

Abstract

We have formulated the quantum rearrangement scattering of atom-diatomic molecules in phase space from the viewpoint of the density operators within the framework of Torres-Vega's and Frederick's phase-space representation of quantum mechanics [J. Chem. Phys. 98, 3103 (1993); 93, 8862 (1990)]. This formalism has a remarkable feature in that it naturally includes the on-the-energy-shell coherences of the initial system that are important for depicting actual scattering experiments. We have found that the full density operator describing the rearrangement scattering is closely related not only to the usual reactive transition operator T${\mathrm{^}}_{\mathrm{\ensuremath{\beta}}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\alpha}}}$, but also to the function F defined in the paper which is nonlocal in position vector and could reflect some fine structures of the reactive scattering in strong interaction region. The time-dependent reactive scattering in the quantum phase-space representation is also discussed.