There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

A review of the theoretical and computational modeling of bimolecular reactions is given. The review is divided into several sections which are as follows: gas-phase thermal reactions; gas-phase state-selected reactions and product state distributions; and condensed-phase bimolecular reactions. The section on gas-phase thermal reactions covers the enthalpies and free energies of reaction, kinetics, saddle points and potential energy surfaces, rate theory for simple barrier reactions and bimolecular reactions over potential wells. The section on gas-phase state-selected reactions focuses on electronically adiabatic reactions and electronically nonadiabatic reactions. Finally, the section on condensed-phase bimolecular reactions covers reactions in liquids, reactions on surfaces and in solids and tunneling at low temperature.

Modeling the Kinetics of Bimolecular Reactions

Molecular Reaction Dynamics: Frontmatter

The time-dependent quantum wave packet approach has been improved and formulated to treat the multiple surface problems and thus provided a new simple, yet a clear quantum picture for interpreting the reaction mechanism underlying the nonadiabatic dynamical processes. The method keeps the salient feature of the original quantum wave packet theory developed for single surface problems, i.e. the introduction of the absorbing potential and the grid basis including the discrete variable representation and the fast Fourier transformation, which makes the present methodology a very efficient implement for the nonadiabatic quantum scattering calculations. Here, we review the theoretical basis of this approach and its applications to the fundamental triatomic chemical reactions, the latter include the nonadiabatic dynamics calculations on the F + H2, F + HD, F + D2, O(1D) + N2, O(3P, 1D) + H2, D+ + H2, and H+ + D2 reactions. We also present a thorough historical overview of the theoretically nonadiabatic dynamica...

The time-dependent quantum wave packet approach to the electronically nonadiabatic processes in chemical reactions

Biopolymer aerogels were among the first aerogels produced, but only in the last decade has research on biopolymer and biopolymer-composite aerogels become popular, motivated by sustainability arguments, their unique and tunable properties, and ease of functionalization. Biopolymer aerogels and open-cell foams have great potential for classical aerogel applications such as thermal insulation, as well as emerging applications in filtration, oil-water separation, CO2 capture, catalysis, and medicine. The biopolymer aerogel field today is driven forward by empirical materials discovery at the laboratory scale, but requires a firmer theoretical basis and pilot studies to close the gap to market. This Review includes a database with over 3800 biopolymer aerogel properties, evaluates the state of the biopolymer aerogel field, and critically discusses the scientific, technological, and commercial barriers to the commercialization of these exciting materials.

Biopolymer Aerogels and Foams: Chemistry, Properties, and Applications.

Quasiclassical trajectory method for molecular scattering processes: necessity of a weighted binning approach

Gaussian weighting in the quasiclassical trajectory method

Aeropectin: Fully Biomass-Based Mechanically Strong and Thermal Superinsulating Aerogel

Molecular beam experiments provide fascinating data on how atoms move in the course of chemical reactions. In order to theoretically reproduce these data at relatively low computational cost and to interpret them, nuclei are often treated as classical particles, even though we have known for about a century that, in the range of energies usually available to chemical systems, their motion is best described by the laws of quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, over the last decade this approximation has been shown to work unexpectedly well, provided that a few constraints are introduced into the calculations in order to take into account the quantisation of product internal motions. Why this is so and the nature of the previous constraints are the central issues of this review article.

Classical dynamics of chemical reactions in a quantum spirit

In recent years, many chemical reactions have been studied by means of the quasiclassical trajectory (QCT) method within the Gaussian binning (GB) procedure. The latter consists of "quantizing" the final vibrational actions in Bohr spirit by putting strong emphasis on the trajectories reaching the products with vibrational actions close to integer values. A major drawback of this procedure is that if N is the number of product vibrational modes, the amount of trajectories necessary to converge the calculations is ∼10(N)×larger than with the standard QCT method. Applying it to polyatomic processes is thus problematic. In a recent paper, however, Czako and Bowman propose to quantize the total vibrational energy instead of the vibrational actions [G. Czako and J. M. Bowman, J. Chem. Phys. 131, 244302 (2009)], a procedure called 1GB here. The calculations are then only ∼10 times more time consuming than with the standard QCT method, allowing thereby for considerable numerical saving. In this paper, we propose some theoretical arguments supporting the 1GB procedure and check its validity on model test cases as well as the prototype four-atom reaction OH+D(2)→HOD+D.

Laurent Bonnet

Papers

Quasiclassical trajectory method for molecular scattering processes: necessity of a weighted binning approach

Gaussian weighting in the quasiclassical trajectory method

Aeropectin: Fully Biomass-Based Mechanically Strong and Thermal Superinsulating Aerogel

Classical dynamics of chemical reactions in a quantum spirit

The method of Gaussian weighted trajectories. V. On the 1GB procedure for polyatomic processes