ChemInform Abstract: MOLECULAR DYNAMICS OF CHEMICAL REACTIONS IN SOLUTION

Abstract

Impressive progress has been made in the last twenty five years in understanding the detailed nature of chemical processes involving a few atoms at a time, as honored in the recent Nobel Prize to Herschbach, Lee and Polanyi. Unfortunately, most processes of interest to most chemists involve the simultaneous interaction of many atoms. Examples include all of liquid solution chemistry (and thus most of inorganic and organic chemistry) and chemistry involving large molecules (and thus most of polymer chemistry and biochemistry). A realistic assessment of many atom chemistry in general and liquid solution chemistry in particular is that we know very little as yet about the microscopic details of such processes. Given the clear importance of solution chemistry, it is surprising that so little is known about liquid state solution reactions from the fundamental viewpoint of how they take place as seen from the microscopic perspective of molecular dynamics, in other words of the atomic motions by which they happen.