Time-dependent wavepacket investigation of state-to-state reactive scattering of Cl with para-H2 including the open-shell character of the Cl atom.

We describe a time-dependent wavepacket based method for the calculation of the state-to-state cross sections for the Cl+H2 reaction including all couplings arising from the nonzero spin and electronic orbital angular momenta of the Cl atom. Reactant-product decoupling allows us to use a physically correct basis in both the reactant and the product arrangements. Our calculated results agree well with the experimental results of Yang and co-workers. We also describe a model with two coupled potential energy surfaces, which includes the spin-orbit coupling, which is responsible for the largest non-Born–Oppenheimer effects in the Cl+H2 reaction but neglects the off-diagonal electronically diabatic coupling and all Coriolis couplings due to the electronic spin and orbital angular momenta. The comparison of the results of the full six-state and two-state models with an electronically adiabatic (one-state) description reveals that the latter describes well the reaction out of the ground spin-orbit state, while the two-state model, which is computationally much faster than the full six-state model, describes well the reaction from both the ground and excited spin-orbit states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]