Quasiclassical trajectory study of energy transfer and collision-induced dissociation in hyperthermal Ar + CH4 and Ar + CF4 collisions

We present a study of energy transfer in collisions of Ar with methane and perfluoromethane at hyperthermal energies (E(coll) = 4-10 eV). Quasiclassical trajectory calculations of Ar + CX(4) (X = H, F) collisions indicate that energy transfer from reagents' translation to internal modes of the alkane molecule is greatly enhanced by fluorination. The reasons for the enhancement of energy transfer upon fluorination are shown to emerge from a decrease in the hydrocarbon vibrational frequencies of the CX(4) molecule with increasing the mass of the X atom, and to an increase of the steepness of the Ar-CX(4) intermolecular potential. At high collision energies, we find that the cross section of Ar + CF(4) collisions in which the amount of energy transfer is larger than needed to break a C-F bond is at least 1 order of magnitude larger than the cross sections of Ar + CH(4) collisions producing CH(4) with energy above the dissociation limit. In addition, collision-induced dissociation is detected in short time scales in the case of the fluorinated species at E(coll) = 10 eV. These results suggest that the cross section for degradation of fluorinated hydrocarbon polymers under the action of nonreactive hyperthermal gas-phase species might be significantly larger than that of hydrogenated hydrocarbon polymers. We also illustrate a practical way to derive intramolecular potential energy surfaces for bond-breaking collisions by improving semiempirical Hamiltonians based on grids of high-quality ab initio calculations.