Recent Advances in Ozone Photochemistry: A Lambda Doublet Propensity and Spin-Forbidden Channels

Recent studies on ozone photodissociation in the Hartley and Huggins bands have provided new insights into the dissociation dynamics and product state distributions. A Λ-doublet propensity in the photodissociation has been identified through experiment and theory as the origin of the oscillatory O₂(a1Δ_g) rotational distributions and provides a promising diagnostic for determining the relative contributions of 3A' and 3A″ states in Huggins band spin-forbidden processes. Recent experiments on spin-forbidden dissociation have provided detailed information about the vibrational and rotational distributions of the O₂ products and the branching ratios between the O₂ electronic states, serving as a motivation for high-level theory.