Elementary reactions
General chemical kinetics

The article defined the concept of elementary reaction and assigned four objectives to theory and experiment:

• identify the kinetic factors that influence the rate of an elementary reaction ;

• establish the mathematical form of kinetic laws ;

• estimate the orders of magnitude of the parameters appearing in these laws;

• provide correlations between kinetic quantities and thermodynamic quantities or structural parameters.

Three main approaches can be envisaged to achieve these objectives.

• Molecular chemical dynamics deals with the intermolecular and intramolecular motions that occur during an elementary reaction, taking into account the quantum...