M.C. Garner, K.A. Hanold, M. Sowa Resat and R.E. Continetti, "Stability and Dissociation Dynamics of the Low-Lying Excited States of Ozone.", J. Phys. Chem. 101, 6577-6582 (1997).
This paper reports an investigation of the stability and dissociation dynamics of the low-lying singlet and triplet states of ozone (O3) using coincident photoelectron and photofragment translational spectroscopy. These experiments provide an upper limit of 0.5 ms for the lifetime of the low-lying excited states of O3. The 3A2 and 3B2 states dissociate with nearly all available energy appearing in translation. Dissociation of the higher-lying 3B1 and 1A2 states produces rotationally and possibly vibrationally excited O2 products. The product translational energy distributions indicate that the 3B1 state dissociates non-adiabatically to ground state O(3P) + O2(3Sigmag-) products.