Vibrational energy distribution of CsF produced by reactive beam scattering of Cs by SF6 and SF4

The molecular beam electric resonance method has been used to measure the vibrational energy distribution of CsF produced in the chemical reactions Cs + SF₆ and SF₄. The reaction Cs + SF₆ yields a perfect Boltzmann distribution for the products CsF. For the reaction Cs + SF₄ a more complicated distribution has been found which, according to the molecular structure of SF₄, can be explained as a superposition of two Boltzmann distributions of different vibrational temperatures.