Rotational state distributions following the photodissociation of Cl–CN: Comparison of classical and quantum mechanical calculations.

We report exact quantum mechanical close-coupling calculations for the photodissociation of Cl–CN using the ab initio potential of Waite and Dunlap. We find that the simple classical calculations of Barts and Halpern based on the rotational reflection principle agree very nicely with the exact rotational state distributions. Furthermore, it is shown that the impulsive model fails severely to account for the high degree of rotational excitation in the photodissociation of Cl–CN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]