Effect of the initial excitation of the intermolecular stretching mode in Ar–HBr photolysis

Abstract

The effect of the initial excitation of the van der Waals (vdW) stretching mode is explored in Ar–HBr(v = 1) photolysis by a comparison with the cases of no initial vdW excitation and bending excitation. It is found that vdW stretching excitation produces a different photolysis outcome than the other two cluster initial states regarding the yield and state distributions of the products. The differences are related to the different shapes of the initial distributions of intra-cluster geometries produced with or without excitation of the different vdW modes. We conclude that selecting the initial cluster state through vdW mode excitation, prior to photo-dissociation, allows for some control over the photolysis products.