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 states of the reactants and products.

  From an experimental point of view, reactive species are produced in well-defined vibrational,...