Low-energy inelastic collisions of OH radicals with He atoms and D${}_2$ molecules

Abstract

We present an experimental study on the rotational inelastic scattering of OH ($X^2{\Pi }_{3/2},J=3/2,f$) radicals with He and D${}_2$ at collision energies between 100 and 500 cm${}^{-1}$ in a crossed beam experiment. The OH radicals are state selected and velocity tuned using a Stark decelerator. Relative parity-resolved state-to-state inelastic scattering cross sections are accurately determined. These experiments complement recent low-energy collision studies between trapped OH radicals and beams of He and D${}_2$ that are sensitive to the total (elastic and inelastic) cross sections (Sawyer \emph{et al.}, \emph{Phys. Rev. Lett.} \textbf{2008}, \emph{101}, 203203), but for which the measured cross sections could not be reproduced by theoretical calculations (Pavlovic \emph{et al.}, \emph{J. Phys. Chem. A} \textbf{2009}, \emph{113}, 14670). For the OH-He system, our experiments validate the inelastic cross sections determined from rigorous quantum calculations.

8 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Low-energy molecular collisions in a permanent magnetic trap
• Mechanism of Collisional Spin Relaxation in Triplet-Sigma Molecules
• Operation of a Stark decelerator with optimum acceptance

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