Non-Sticking of Helium Buffer Gas to Hydrocarbons

Abstract

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 Cui {\it et al}.