Collinear collision of an atom with a homonuclear diatomic molecule

Abstract The problem of collinear scattering of an atom from a homonuclear diatomic molecule is formulated in terms of a first‐order nonlinear matrix differential equation for the variable coefficient of reflection. For a homonuclear molecule when the target Hamiltonian is invariant under the parity transformation, only transitions between even states or odd states are possible. This selection rule reduces the number of open or closed channels …