Unimolecular reaction rate theory

G.M. Wieder and R.A. Marcus. Dissociation and Isomerization of Vibrationally Excited Species. II. Unimolecular Reaction Rate Theory and Its Application. J. Chem. Phys., 37 1835-1852,1962. 

Experimental rate constants, kinetic isotope effects and chemical branching ratios for the CF2CFCICH3-do, -d, -d2, and -d2 molecules have been experimentally measured and interpreted using statistical unimolecular reaction rate theory.52 The structural properties of the transition states needed for the theory have been calculated by DFT at the B3PW91 /6-31 G(d,p/) level. 

CLASSICAL, SEMICLASSICAL, AND QUANTUM MECHANICAL UNIMOLECULAR REACTION RATE THEORY... 

Recent years have also witnessed exciting developments in the active control of unimolecular reactions [30,31]. Reactants can be prepared and their evolution interfered with on very short time scales, and coherent hght sources can be used to imprint information on molecular systems so as to produce more or less of specified products. Because a well-controlled unimolecular reaction is highly nonstatistical and presents an excellent example in which any statistical theory of the reaction dynamics would terribly fail, it is instmctive to comment on how to view the vast control possibihties, on the one hand, and various statistical theories of reaction rate, on the other hand. Note first that a controlled unimolecular reaction, most often subject to one or more external fields and manipulated within a very short time scale, undergoes nonequilibrium processes and is therefore not expected to be describable by any unimolecular reaction rate theory that assumes the existence of an equilibrium distribution of the internal energy of the molecule. Second, strong deviations Ifom statistical behavior in an uncontrolled unimolecular reaction can imply the existence of order in chaos and thus more possibilities for inexpensive active control of product formation. Third, most control scenarios rely on quantum interference effects that are neglected in classical reaction rate theory. Clearly, then, studies of controlled reaction dynamics and studies of statistical reaction rate theory complement each other. 

The Davis-Gray theory teaches us that by retaining the most important elements of the nonhnear reaction dynamics it is possible to accurately locate the intramolecular bottlenecks and to have an exact phase space separatrix as the transition state. Unfortunately, even for systems with only two DOFs, there may be considerable technical difficulties associated with locating the exact bottlenecks and the separatrix. Exact calculations of the fluxes across these phase space structures present more problems. For these reasons, further development of unimolecular reaction rate theory requires useful approximations. 

As shown above, classical unimolecular reaction rate theory is based upon our knowledge of the qualitative nature of the classical dynamics. For example, it is essential to examine the rate of energy transport between different DOFs compared with the rate of crossing the intermolecular separatrix. This is also the case if one attempts to develop a quantum statistical theory of unimolecular reaction rate to replace exact quantum dynamics calculations that are usually too demanding, such as the quantum wave packet dynamics approach, the flux-flux autocorrelation formalism, and others. As such, understanding quantum dynamics in classically chaotic systems in general and quantization effects on chaotic transport in particular is extremely important. 

In this chapter we have reviewed the development of unimolecular reaction rate theory for systems that exhibit deterministic chaos. Our attention is focused on a number of classical statistical theories developed in our group. These theories, applicable to two- or three-dimensional systems, have predicted reaction rate constants that are in good agreement with experimental data. We have also introduced some quantum and semiclassical approaches to unimolecular reaction rate theory and presented some interesting results on the quantum-classical difference in energy transport in classically chaotic systems. There exist numerous other studies that are not considered in this chapter but are of general interest to unimolecular reaction rate theory. 

In the first part, our aim is to discuss how we can apply concepts drawn from dynamical systems theory to reaction processes, especially unimolecular reactions of few-body systems. In conventional reaction rate theory, dynamical aspects are replaced by equilibrium statistical concepts. However, from the standpoint of chaos, the applicability of statistical concepts itself is problematic. The contribution of Rice s group gives us detailed analyses of this problem from the standpoint of chaos, and it presents a new approach toward unimolecular reaction rate theory. 

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