IR multiple photon dissociation of fluorinated ethanes and ethylenes: HF vibrational energy distributions

The IR multiple photon dissociation of fluorinated ethanes and ethylenes produces vibrationally excited HF via collisionless molecular elimination. The HF† fluorescence spectra have been measured and analyzed in order to determine the relative vibrational level populations produced by the dissociation processes. These results are compared to those obtained by others who used alternate methods of excitation. The measured vibrational level distributions cannot be adequately represented by single temperature Boltzmann distributions or by a statistical partitioning of the available energy. It is estimated that less than 30% of the fixed energy appears as vibrational excitation of the HF fragment.