Studying ‘chattering collisions’ in the Cl + ethane reaction with classical trajectories

Classical trajectories have been computed using highly oriented reagents for the reaction Cl + C2H6 → HCl + C2H5 to examine the validity of a mechanism proposed in a recent experimental study by Huang et al. The low translational energies of some HCl products scattered in the backwards hemisphere in these experiments were attributed to ‘chattering collisions’ that internally excite the ethyl co-product. While trajectories involving oscillations of the H atom between Cl and C are observed in the current calculations, the resultant distributions of product internal energies and angular scattering are nearly identical to trajectories displaying direct scattering dynamics.