Exponentiating trajectories on a realistic potentil energy surface for sodium trimera

Abstract

a realistic potential energy surface previously reported by the authors. It is shown that the trajectories are exponentially diverging even for very low energies close to the bottom of the potential well. This fact is confinned by the calculated maximum Lyapunov characteristic numbers, which suggest that the Na3 molecule possesses a small vibrational relaxation time. This result corroborates previous findings on atom-diatom reactive scattering for analogous systems, which have indicated a high degree of statistical behavior in the dynamics of these reactions.