Neutral molecules, isolated in the gas phase, can be prepared in a long-lived excited state and stored in a trap. The long observation time afforded by the trap can then be exploited to measure the radiative lifetime of this state by monitoring the temporal decay of the population in the trap. This method is demonstrated here and used to benchmark the Einstein A coefficients in the Meinel system of OH. A pulsed beam of vibrationally excited OH radicals is Stark decelerated and loaded into an electrostatic quadrupole trap. The radiative lifetime of the upper Lamda-doublet component of the Chi2Pi3/2, v=1, J=3/2 level is determined as 59.0+/-2.0 ms, in good agreement with the calculated value of 58.0+/-1.0 ms.

Comparing text strings in terms of distance functions is a common and fundamental task in many statistical text-processing applications. Thus far, string distance functionality has been somewhat scattered around R and its extension packages, leaving users with inconistent interfaces and encoding handling. The stringdist package was designed to offer a low-level interface to several popular string distance algorithms which have been re-implemented in C for this purpose. The package offers distances based on counting q-grams, edit-based distances, and some lesser known heuristic distance functions. Based on this functionality, the package also offers inexact matching equivalents of R's native exact matching functions match and %in%.

The authors present a new potential energy curve, electric dipole moment function, and spin-orbit coupling function for OH in the X 2 ⌸ state, based on high-level ab initio calculations. These properties, combined with a spectroscopically parametrized lambda-type doubling Hamiltonian, are used to compute the Einstein A coefficients and photoabsorption cross sections for the OH Meinel transitions. The authors investigate the effect of spin-orbit coupling on the lifetimes of rovibrationally excited states. Comparing their results with earlier ab initio calculations, they conclude that their dipole moment and potential energy curve give the best agreement with experimental data to date. The results are made available via EPAPS Document No. E-JCPSAG-017709.

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High-level ab initio potential-energy curves and transition dipole moments for the OH X 2Pi, 2 2Pi, 1 2Sigma-, D 2Sigma-, 3 2Sigma-, A 2Sigma+, B 2Sigma+, 1 2Delta, 1 4Sigma-, and 1 4Pi states are computed. The results are used to estimate the (2+1) resonance enhanced multiphoton ionization spectrum for the (D,3)2Sigma-(upsilon')<--2hnuX 2Piupsilon") transitions, which are compared with experiments by Greenslade et al. [see M. E. Greenslade, M. I. Lester, D. C. Radenovic, J. A. van Roij, and D. H. Parker, J. Chem. Phys. 123, 074309 (2005), preceeding paper]. We use the discrete variable representation-absorbing boundary condition method to incorporate the effect of the dissociative intermediate 1 2Sigma- state. We obtain qualitative agreement with experiment for the line strengths. Radiative and predissociative decay rates of the Rydberg (D,3)2Sigma- states of OH and OD were computed, including spin-orbit coupling effects and the effect of spin-electronic and gyroscopic coupling. We show that the lifetime of the Rydberg 2Sigma- states for rotationally cold molecules is limited mainly by predissociation caused by spin-orbit coupling.