Probing stereodynamics in reactive collisions using helicity filtering

Stereodynamic effects in the D + H2 reaction are studied using a new method that permits reagent-helicity dependent cross sections to be inferred from the scattering results obtained using randomly oriented reagent molecules. Employing fully converged quantum scattering calculations as a benchmark, it is demonstrated that the method yields useful results for all the helicity states corresponding to j = 1 and 2 of the H2 diatom.