Electronic to vibrational rotational energy transfer in collisions of Na(3 ²P) with NO and small organic molecules

The energy ΔE_vibrot transferred by quenching Na(3 ²P_3/2) to internal degrees of freedom of NO and small organic molecules with double bonds (C₂H₄, C₃H₆, C₄H₆, C₄H₈, and C₂H₂) has been investigated in a crossed beam experiment with laser excited Na. The results for NO show a maximum cross section for small ΔE_vibrot and are critically compared with findings of other groups. The energy transfer spectra of organic molecules show that between 40% and 80% of the available total energy is transferred to the molecule in the average. The results are analyzed in the framework of statistical prior distributions, which give good agreement with the experiment when we assume that only a small number of internal degrees of freedom participates in the reaction.