Master Equation for the Dissociation of a Dilute Diatomic Gas. V. Effect of Energy-level Spacing

Abstract

Our previous vibration–dissociation coupling calculations for H2 have been repeated for D2. Closer spacing of the vibrational energy levels in D2 leads to increased translation–vibration transition probabilities, and the effect of this is to increase the rate of recombination by the vibrational mechanism at all temperatures. These numerical experiments also clarify two other issues: (i) that the position of the bottleneck does not necessarily occur at that level above which direct collisional dissociation can take place rapidly, and (ii) that there is no simple correspondence between the position of the bottleneck and the Arrhenius temperature coefficient for dissociation.