Croatica Chemica Acta, Vol. 64 No. 2, 1991.
Original scientific paper
Long Lived States in Atom-Molecule Collisions
S. D. Bosanac
; R. Bošković Institute, 41001 Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia
Abstract
Understanding of the processes in molecular collisions is of great importance for many areas of research. In chemistry and molecular astrophysics, there is great interest in calculating reaction rates. For elementary particle and nuclear physics, it is of interest to find fundamentally new concepts underlying the mechanism of collisions. And for some, the molecular collision problems are interesting on their own. The most elementary process that is usually studied is a binary collision. If this encounter is brief, we talk about direct collisions. However, if during an encounter, the species are stuck to each other for a long time, we talk about collisions mediated by a long lived state. The theory of collisions mediated by long lived states is very complex and only few basic principles were given in quantum theory; a central place being given to resonances. However, as it will be shown, the theory of such collisions is far from being completed and, in fact, is in its infancy. It is the purpose of this paper to review what is known about the subject and locate the problems.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
137297
URI
Publication date:
15.10.1991.
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