Orientation and Alignment of Reaction Products

are intrinsically anisotropic because certain angles of approach of A to BC and of separation of AB from C are preferred, as are certain planes of rotation of the reagent and product molecules. Most of the experimental and theoretical efforts aimed at understanding elementary reactions have been applied to the study of the scalar properties of Reaction 1, such as how the rate of reaction varies with the energies of the reagents or how the energy available after reaction is partitioned among the internal and translational degrees of freedom of the products. To concentrate exclusively on the scalar properties of the reaction is to neglect, however, the vector properties that are key indicators of the anisotropic forces present in the reaction. Vector properties, such as velocities and angular momenta, possess not only magnitudes that can be directly related to translational and rotational energies, but also well-defined directions. Only by understanding the scalar and vector properties together, as well as possible