Velocity distributions as a function of the internal state of reactively scattered species from Fourier transform Doppler spectroscopy

The OH(OD) product of the reaction H(D)+NO2 has been studied in crossed molecular beams by laser-induced fluorescence. A new experimental technique of Fourier transform Doppler spectroscopy has been used to extract the velocity information within the Doppler profiles of several features in the excitation spectra. In this way, the speed and angular distributions of the reactively scattered products have been obtained as a function of the molecules’ internal states. The observed distributions do not vary strongly from state to state. The angular distributions peak in the forward direction along the initial H(D) atom direction in the center of mass coordinates system but show a large amount of backward scattering. Approximately 25% of the reaction exoergicity is manifested in product translation.