Non-sticking of helium buffer gas to hydrocarbons

Lifetimes of complexes formed during helium-hydrocarbon collisions at low temperature are estimated for symmetric-top hydrocarbons. The lifetimes are obtained using a density-of-states approach. In general the lifetimes are less than 10–100 ns and are found to decrease with increasing hydrocarbon size. This suggests that clustering will not limit precision spectroscopy in helium-buffer-gas experiments. Lifetimes are computed for noble-gas benzene collisions and are found to be in reasonable agreement with lifetimes obtained from classical trajectories as reported by J. Cui et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 141, 164315 (2014)].