Adiabatic changes, 166 --- atomic properties

Landau and Teller demonstrated that the transfer of the vibrational energy of a diatomic molecule into translational energy of colliding partners (say, a diatomic molecule and an noble gas atom) is a very inefficient process, and this property of the collision is related to the Ehrenfest adiabatic principle [5] of mechanics. In its simplest version, the adiabatic principle asserts that the change 57, of the action variable 7, of a classical system under die influence of a slow external perturbation of... 

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