What you will find in this book

We understand very well that any book inavoidably reflects authors interests and scientific taste this fact is, first of all, usually seen in the selection of material which in our case is very plentiful and diverse. For instance. Chapter 2 gives examples of different general approaches used in chemical kinetics (macroscopic, mesoscopic and microscopic) and numerous methods for solving particular problems. We focus here on the microscopic approach based on the concept of active particles (stracture elements, reactants, defects) whose spatial redistribution arises due to their diffusion affected by 

The authors of this book started working on chemical kinetics more than 10 yeturs ago focusing on investigations of particular radiation - induced processes in solids and liquids. Condensed matter physics, however, treats point (radiation) defects as active particles whose individual characteristics define kinetics of possible processes and radiation properties of materials. A study of an ensemble of such particles (defects), especially if they are created in large concentrations under irradiation for a long time, has lead us to many-particle problems, common in statistical physics. However, the standard theory of diffusion-controlled reactions as developed by Smoluchowski 

It is clear that a complete treatment of the recombination kinetics requires careful incorporation of mutual particle distribution, including Mctwafions in their local concentrations due to diffusion and reaction. At present the role of fluctuations in reactant concentrations in chemical kinetics is well known 

Therefore, we tried to develop the adequate mathematical formalism of the fluctuation-controlled chemical kinetics based on a concept of active particles. Simultaneously, the mesoscopic theory of concentration field fluctuations was developed by a number of investigators (see Chapter 2) having more qualitative character. Undoubtedly, these two approaches - microscopic and mesoscopic - overlap, since a lot of fundamental results like asymptotic 

A careful study of the fluctuation-controlled kinetics performed in recent years has led us to numerous deviations from the results of generally-accepted standard chemical kinetics. To prevent readers from getting lost in details of different formalisms and the ocean of equations presented in this book, we present in this introductory Chapter a brief summary, explain the necessity of developing the fluctuation kinetics and demonstrate its peculiarities compared with techniques presented earlier. We will use here the simplest mathematical formalism and focus on basic ideas which will be discussed later on in full detail. 

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