Selective rovibrational energy transfer: A classical trajectory study of collisional energy redistribution in methyl radical Original Research Article

A classical trajectory study was performed on planar CH3 to investigate the cause of anomalous experimentally observed state selectivity in the collisional deactivation of CH4. Despite complicated and possibly chaotic dynamics in some of the vibrational states, one vibration was found stable enough to simulate the conditions of the experiment. The results agree with experiment and confirm that the selectivity is due to simple time-scale differences rather than the more commonly used energy-gap arguments. A detailed description of the nonstandard method for assigning the initial and final states is given.