Information, Memory and Statistical Theories of Elementary Chemical Reactions

Abstract

AbstractThe dissipation of information in collisions involving strongly bound intermediates is considered. A quantitative measure for the memory μ in such collisions is introduced. It is shown that the memory is important even for strong coupling situations where statistical theories may be valid. The relationship between various statistical theories for product state distributions, like phase space theory and the statistical adiabatic channel model, and the “prior distributions” in the information theoretic approach is discussed. The microcanonical equilibrium distribution is found to be theoretically unsatisfactory as a reference distribution. We propose replacing it by another distribution without memory and without dynamical constraints apart from angular momentum conservation. The concepts are illustrated with several simple model calculations for atom‐diatomic molecule collisions. The question of linear surprisal plots is discussed briefly.