Collision lifetimes of polyatomic molecules at low temperatures: benzene-benzene vs benzene-rare gas atom collisions

We use classical trajectory calculations to study the effects of the interaction strength and the geometry of rigid polyatomic molecules on the formation of long-lived collision complexes at low collision energies. We first compare the results of the calculations for collisions of benzene molecules with rare gas atoms He, Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe. The comparison illustrates that the mean lifetimes of the collision complexes increase monotonically with the strength of the atom-molecule interaction. We then compare the results of the atom-benzene calculations with those for benzene-benzene collisions. The comparison illustrates that the mean lifetimes of the benzene-benzene collision complexes are significantly reduced due to non-ergodic effects prohibiting the molecules from sampling the entire configuration space. We find that the thermally averaged lifetimes of the benzene-benzene collisions are much shorter than those for Xe with benzene and similar to those for Ne with benzene.