A classical trajectory study of the photodissociation spectrum of H+3

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Abstract
The photodissociation spectrum of H+3 is studied using classical mechanical methods. Tunneling rates and product translational energies are computed for a large range of total angular momentum and energy. We predict that the experimentally measured spectrum of Carrington and Kennedy is dominated by low total angular momentum and low energy (relative to dissociation). There is an almost one to one correspondence between the measured product translational energy and the total angular momentum. The classical dipole spectrum of chaotic trajectories is found to be relatively structureless, changes slowly with total J, and does not show any correspondence or indication of the experimentally measured regular structure found in the coarse grained spectrum. We conclude that the regularity found in the coarse grained spectrum should be associated with a stable manifold of trajectories. We find that the horseshoe periodic orbit previously found to be stable at J=0 exists also for nonzero J and is stable with respect to small perturbations in 3D. The rotational constant of the rotating horseshoe is 30 cm−1 in interesting agreement with the experiment. The properties of the rotating horseshoe are studied in detail, a novel adiabatic switching method is used to study the stability of the orbit. A quantum formalism of Taylor and Zakrzewski that shows how periodic orbits may cause structure in quantal spectra is used to indicate why the features of the rotating horseshoe orbit may appear in the coarse grained spectrum. The experimental coarse grained features are interpreted as an R branch of the ν3 mode of the rotating horseshoe.