The effect of the molecular geometry on He*-H2 autoionization reaction

The new technology developed by Ed Narevicius, enables chemical reactions to proceed at very low temperatures, close to absolute zero¹². For example, an autoionization reaction was observed in the collision of an excited helium atom and a hydrogen molecule. The investigation of such reaction is enabled by complex potential energy surface (CPES). In our research, using the CPESs obtained by Bhattacharya and her coworkers3, we study the autoionization reaction rate during the collision of He^* (³P,1s2p) and H₂ as related to their geometry. For the calculation of the autoionization reaction rate, we use a simple closed-form expression which was recently developed by us³, and yielded a great agreement with the experimental results of the collision between He^* (³S,1s2s) and H₂⁴.

References

1. Klein, Ayelet, et al. "Directly probing anisotropy in atom-molecule collisions through quantum scattering resonances." Nature Physics (2016).‏
2. Shagam, Yuval, et al. "Molecular hydrogen interacts more strongly when rotationally excited at low temperatures leading to faster reactions." Nature chemistry 7.11 (2015): 921.‏
3. Bhattacharya, Debarati, et al. To be published.
4. Pawlak, Mariusz, Anael Ben-Asher, and Nimrod Moiseyev. "Simple Closed-Form Expression for Penning Reaction Rate Coefficients for Cold Molecular Collisions by Non-Hermitian Time-Independent Adiabatic Scattering Theory." Journal of chemical theory and computation 14.1 (2017): 236-241.‏
5. Bhattacharya, Debarati, et al. "Polyatomic ab-initio complex potential energy surfaces: illustration of ultracold collisions." Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (2017).‏ף