Polarization control of branching ratios in photodissociation

It is shown that product ratios in photodissociation differential cross sections can be controlled experimentally by variation of the polarization of the exciting laser. For M-selected initial states, where M is the angular momentum projection quantum number of the initial bound level, control can be complete insofar as one can totally eliminate production of a selected product-arrangement channel. Further we show that control survives M averaging for ${}_{}{}^1{}_{}{}^{}\to _{}^1{}_{}{}^{}$Π systems. The method is applied to model diatomic ${}_{}{}^1{}_{}{}^{}\to _{}^1{}_{}{}^{}$Σ and ${}_{}{}^1{}_{}{}^{}\to _{}^1{}_{}{}^{}$Π photodissociation.