Visible/Infrared Dissociation of NO3: Roaming in the Dark or Roaming on the Ground?

Abstract

We present a DC slice imaging study of roaming dynamics in the photodissociation of the nitrate radical, NO3, contrasting pure visible excitation with a combination of visible and CO2 laser excitation at 10.6 μm. Images of specific rotational levels of NO are seen to reflect dissociation on the ground and first excited electronic states, as reported in previous work. The branching is obtained for specific rotational levels by comparison to quasiclassical trajectory calculations of the dynamics on these two surfaces. The results for the visible dissociation are found to be very similar to the combination of visible and infrared, raising questions about the nature of the coupling of these surfaces, the extent to which roaming takes place on both, and how the final product branching is determined.