Chemical dynamics in the presence of a heat bath

The main problem of elementary chemical reaction dynamics is to find the rate constant of the transition in the reaction complex interacting with its environment. This problem, in principle, is close to the general problem of statistical mechanics of irreversible processes (see, e.g., Blum [1981], Kubo et al. [1985]) about the relaxation of initially nonequilibrium state of a particle in the presence of a reservoir (heat bath). If the particle is coupled to the reservoir weakly enough, then the properties of the latter are fully determined by the spectral characteristics of its susceptibility coefficients. 

To conclude, we have synthesized VO2 with a perfect crystal stmcture in opal pores using the chemical bath deposition technique. The parameters of the semiconductor-metal phase transition in the prepared material indicate the presence of a small amount of oxygen defects. We have achieved a controllable and reproducible variation of the PEG properties of the opal-V02 composite and inverted VO2 composite during heating and cooling. This is due to the change in the dielectric constant of VO2 at the phase transition. We demonstrated dynamical tuning of the PEG position in synthetic opals filled with VO2 imder laser pulses. 

A different formahsm in which the diffusion of a Brownian gas in a fluid under stationary and non-stationary flow has been analyzed is mesoscopic nonequilibrium thermodynamics (MNET) (Perez-Madrid, 1994 Rubi Mazur, 1994 Rubi P rez-Madrid, 1999). This theory uses the nonequUibrium thermodynamics rules in the phase space of the system, and allows to derive Fokker-Planck equations that are coupled with the thermodynamic forces associated to the interaction between the system and the heat bath. The effects of this coupling on system s dynamics are not obvious. This is the case of Brownian motion in the presence of flow where, as we have discussed previously, both the diffusion coefficient and the chemical potential become modified by the presence of flow (Reguera Rubi, 2003a b Santamaria Holek, 2005 2009 2001). 

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