Reaction Profiles and Structure Correlation

The curvature about the minima is an expression of molecular flexibility, which can be ascertained, in principle at least, from knowledge of the molecular vibrations. From a more general viewpoint, the reaction profile must be regarded as a more or less complicated curve on a multi-dimensional energy hyper-surface. 

This approach for delineating the structural course of a chemical reaction in configuration space has been applied by now to many organic and inorganic transformations, including bond-breaking/bond-making processes as well as conformational interconversion. Many examples are discussed in Chapters 6 to 9 of this book. 

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