Bimolecular Reactions of Electronically Excited Species

A large number of papers dealing with electronically excited species have been published recently, partly in connection with the study of elementary processes in the upper atmosphere. From the standpoint of atmospheric physics and chemistry, of particular interest are the chemical reactions of long-lived atoms in 

Besides the atomic reactions, many papers are concerned with reactions of electronically excited molecules and radicals, in particular of NO, O2, CH9 (see e.g. [232]). 

At least two paths of a bimolecular interaction of an electronically excited species with a molecule are possible the chemical reaction proper and the physical process of deactivation resulting in the loss of the electronic excitation energy and in the transfer of the excited species to the ground or to some low electronic state, e.g. 

Without dwelling on the theoretical estimation of the rate constants of these processes, which would require the construction of potential energy surfaces for the initial and final states of the system, [216] consider only certain experimental results obtained for a reaction of an electronically excited iodine atom with a propane molecule, and for reactions of some other species. 

From the experiments on electronically excited iodine [73] and on the ground- 

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