title: Photodissociation of phosgene: Theoretical evidence for the ultrafast and synchronous concerted three-body process.
abstract: The potential energy surfaces for Cl(2)CO dissociation into CO+Cl+Cl in the lowest two electronic singlet states (S(0) and S(1)) have been determined by the complete active space self-consistent field, coupled-cluster method with single and double excitations (CCSD), and equation-of-motion CCSD calculations, which are followed by direct ab initio molecular dynamics simulations to explore its photodissociation dynamics at 230 nm. It is found that the C-O stretching mode is initially excited upon irradiation and the excess internal energies are transferred to the C-Cl symmetric stretching mode within 200 fs. On average, the first and the second C-Cl bonds break completely within subsequent 60 and 100 fs, respectively. Electronic structure and dynamics calculations have thus provided a strong evidence that the photoinitiated dissociation of Cl(2)CO at 230 nm or shorter wavelengths is an ultrafast, adiabatic, and concerted three-body process. Since the two C-Cl bonds begin to break at the same time and the time interval between the two C-Cl bond broken fully is very short ( approximately 40 fs), the photoinitiated dissociation of Cl(2)CO to CO+2Cl can be considered as the synchronous concerted process.
authors.affiliation: College of Chemistry, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
authors.forename: Qiu
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.forename: Feng
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Lin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.forename: Wei-Hai
authors.initials: WH
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Luo