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Quantumchemical and quantumdynamical calculations on the vibrational excitation and photodissociation of HNO3 with ultrashort laser pulses.
Quantenchemische und quantendynamische Rechnungen zur Schwingungsanregung und Photodissoziation von HNO3 durch ultrakurze Laserpulse

Abstract

This work presents quantumchemical und quantumdynamical simulations on the state specific vibrational excitation and photodissociation of HNO3.
The first part deals with the calculation of ab initio potential energy surfaces for a twodimensional model which treats the OH- and the NO-single- bonds explicitly. Both the MP2 and CASSCF methodes are applied to determine the ground and the lowest three excited electronic states, respectively. The calculations yield good agreement with experimental data.
Based on the ab initio potential of the electronic ground state, the vibrational eigenfunctions are calculated. These eigenfunctions are investigated by means of zero-order states to examine the coupling between the two degrees of freedom.
In the second part, the laser-driven molecular dynamics is simulated using quantum dynamical techniques. Starting from the lowest vibrational eigenfunction of the ground electronic state, highly excited vibrational bound states as well as states lying in the continuum are prepared selectively using using ultrashort IR laser pulses. In addition, the length of NO bound can be controlled at any time by adjusting the phaserelation within the two selective IR laser pulses.
The continuum states prepared by a sequence of two ultrashort pulses show a quasi-coherent vibration in the dissociative continuum of the ground electronic state. Monitoring these vibrations by femtosecond IR+UV pump-probe spectroscopy is simulated using molecular wavepacket propagation.