15min:

ILIAS SIOUTIS, VADIM STAKHURSKY, RUSSELL M. PITZER AND TERRY A. MILLER, Laser Spectroscopy Facility, Department of Chemistry, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210.

Metal clusters are of considerable interest as they bridge the atomic and solid states. Among the heavier homonuclear coinage metals is silver trimer Ag₃, a particularly interesting molecule in that although the orbitally degenerate X ²E' and A ²E'' D_3h states can undergo Jahn-Teller (JT) distortion to C_2v states, spin-orbit splitting may partially quench this distortion. Both laser-induced fluorescence (LIF) and dispersed fluorescence (DF) spectra have been reported for Ag₃. Preliminary JT analyses for the A²E'' and X²E' states have been based, respectively, on the LIF and DF data. However the interpretation has been subject to some ambiguity. High level ab-initio calculations have been performed with the express purpose of estimating the Jahn-Teller constants and spin-orbit effects in both states. These theoretically predicted molecular parameters initiated the Jahn-Teller simulations of the LIF and DF spectra, leading to an overall understanding of the spin-vibronic structure in each case.