Final-State-Resolved Dynamics of the H₃⁺ + CO → H₂ +HCO⁺/HOC⁺ Reaction: A Quasi-Classical Trajectory Study

The ion-molecule reaction H₃⁺ + CO → H₂ + HCO⁺/HOC⁺, which initiates the formation of crucial organic molecules, plays a key role in interstellar and circumstellar environments. In this work, the quasi-classical trajectory method is employed to study the reaction dynamics on a recently developed full-dimensional global potential energy surface (PES). The calculated product internal energy distributions and relative internal excited fractions agree reasonably well with the experimental measurements. For the two reaction channels, most of the available energy flows into the vibrational modes of HCO⁺ or HOC⁺ at low collision energies, followed by the translational mode and the rotational modes of HCO⁺ or HOC⁺. As the collision energy increases, the proportion of the product translational energy increases while the proportion of the product vibrational energy decreases. Furthermore, the CH and CO stretching modes and their combination bands are effectively excited for the product HCO⁺ while the bending mode is remarkably excited for the product HOC⁺.