Energy transfer in reactive and nonreactive collisions of Na with Na2

Stimulated by the experimental finding of vibrationally and rotationally cold dimers in supersonic nozzle molecular beams of sodium, we have studied energy transfer in collisions of Na with Na₂ over a wide range of initial relative translation energies E and impact parameters b by a classical mechanical trajectory method. The vibrational and rotational energies were initialized using Boltzmann distributions characterized by temperatures T_vib = 150 K, T_rot = 50 K. We find that for large values of E the energy transfer in reactive collisions increases with b while it decreases with b for the nonreactive collisions. For low values of E, energy transfer is a decreasing function of b for both reactive and nonreactive encounters. Both the reactive and nonreactive mechanisms are very efficient in effecting transfer, between 40–70% of the initial relative translational energy is converted into internal energy of the diatom, leading to the conclusion that the reverse collisions would result in the rapid relaxation observed in experiment.